The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump White House has decided the US Air Force Academy doesn’t have nearly enough Turning Point USA in its diet, so the president quietly swapped in Erika Kirk — widow of slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk — to a key advisory board overseeing the school’s morale, curriculum, and, you know, how future officers are trained. No press release, no hearing, just poof, her name appears on the official site like a new app icon you didn’t ask for.

Erika, a former Miss Arizona who now runs Charlie’s TPUSA empire, joins a board already stacked with MAGA loyalists: Senator Tommy Tuberville (famous for blocking military promotions and not knowing what the three branches of government are), Dina Powell from Trump’s first-term foreign policy clown car, and assorted GOP senators handpicked by John Thune. The Air Force Academy’s board of visitors is supposed to oversee discipline, academics, and fiscal affairs; Trump is treating it like a donor rewards program for the culture war.

The White House insists she’s a “perfect choice” to “continue his legacy,” which is a poetic way of saying the Air Force Academy is now being used as another stage for TPUSA’s brand of Christian nationalist grievance politics. Meanwhile, Erika is out promoting a Turning Point project to plant a chapter in every public high school in Arkansas, because nothing says civil-military neutrality like fusing the officer pipeline with a partisan youth organization. America’s future pilots are apparently one step closer to getting their ethics lessons from the same people who do viral campus meltdown compilations.

The president of the United States is reportedly spending his golden years as the nation's oldest Florsheim brand ambassador, sitting behind the Resolute desk like a discount Al Bundy and critiquing his cabinet's footwear. Donald Trump has turned Oval Office meetings with JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Howard Lutnick and the rest of the right-wing fan club into a traveling shoe party, complete with size-guessing parlor tricks and follow-up shipments of $145 dress shoes. Policy? Democracy? No time. He's busy running a mid-range men's shoe store out of the West Wing.

Staff say "all the boys" have the presidential loafers now, and they're "afraid not to wear them" – because nothing says healthy workplace culture like your boss forcing you into matching shoes as a visible symbol of loyalty. One cabinet member even had to mothball his Louis Vuitton collection so Dear Leader wouldn't pout. Meanwhile, the Brookings numbers quietly remind us this is the least diverse administration of the century, but sure, let’s focus on the important part: the 79-year-old president presiding over a taxpayer-funded boys' club where Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Lindsey Graham all get their matching autographed kicks.

The White House insists Trump pays for the shoes personally, which is adorable, as though the ethical bar for the presidency is now "doesn't directly bill the government for his weird dominance-fetish swag." Still, it's fitting: a man who built his brand on cheap symbolism and ill-fitting power fantasies has literally reduced the job to handing out identical footwear while measuring his allies by their shoe size. American democracy isn't exactly dead, but it is being slowly replaced by a loyalty program with punch cards and wingtips.

Ed Martin, Trump’s pardon attorney and former head of the administration’s so-called "weaponization working group," is now being formally disciplined for doing exactly what the job title promised: allegedly using his government perch to punish speech he doesn’t like. While serving as interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Martin wrote Georgetown Law’s dean to rage about the school’s DEI policies and announced he’d discriminate against applicants from Georgetown — while explicitly speaking in his official capacity. According to D.C. Disciplinary Counsel Hamilton P. Fox III, that’s not just tacky; it’s a First and Fifth Amendment violation, because you’re not allowed to condition government benefits on a school abandoning its own views.

Georgetown’s then-dean William Treanor had to explain to the chief federal prosecutor for D.C. that the First Amendment means the government doesn’t get to dictate a university’s curriculum — a civics lesson that really should have been covered before they handed him prosecutorial power. Rather than quietly Googling "basic constitutional law," Martin allegedly doubled down, firing off letters to the chief judge and senior judges of the D.C. Court of Appeals demanding they sideline Fox, and copying the White House counsel like a kid CC’ing mom on a playground dispute. The chief judge politely told him to stop trying to have an ex parte tantrum and follow actual procedures, which, to be fair, is not this administration’s core competency.

The Justice Department’s response was to accuse the D.C. Bar of being a partisan hit squad targeting Trump loyalists, while Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche logged on to X to declare the bar a "Democrat-run political organization" and brag that he’s not a member. Bold move for a regime screaming about "weaponization" while its own weaponization czar is under fire for, per the complaint, coercively punishing disfavored viewpoints and trying to pressure judges into firing the ethics watchdog. Trump’s DOJ: still insisting they’re the victims as they swing the hammer at the Constitution.

Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who casually mentioned to Congress that the president had wired the Oval Office like a Mafia social club, has died at 99. His small contribution to history was accidentally confirming a secret taping system that captured Richard Nixon committing crimes, raging, swearing, and being loudly racist — so, basically the 1970s version of a presidential Twitter feed, but on analog.

Butterfield oversaw the voice-activated taping setup that only a handful of people knew existed. When Senate investigators in 1973 tossed out a routine question about whether conversations might have been recorded, he said yes, and Washington promptly realized the president had been running a full-service evidence factory. The resulting legal fight ended with a unanimous supreme court order forcing Nixon to cough up the tapes, which in turn forced him out of office rather than face impeachment.

For his trouble, Butterfield says he was quietly purged from his later job running the FAA under Gerald Ford — because in American politics, telling the truth about presidential crimes is patriotic in theory and a firing offense in practice. He spent the rest of his life calling Nixon what Nixon was — “not an honest man” and “a crook” — and admitted he’d been “cheering” when the resignation finally landed. Imagine: a Republican aide who exposes presidential criminality, helps end a corrupt administration, and then lives long enough to see a future GOP decide that the real lesson of Watergate is that the tapes should have been deleted faster.

Northwest Georgia is holding a special election to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned after a totally normal public breakup with Donald Trump over things like releasing Jeffrey Epstein documents and Trump’s sudden fascination with starting wars instead of just tweeting about them. The 14th District has been without representation in Congress, but don’t worry — the real emergency, according to everyone involved, is whether Trump’s endorsement still functions as a golden ticket in the MAGA Hunger Games.

Trump is backing Clay Fuller, a local DA who proudly branded himself a "MAGA warrior" at a Rome, Georgia rally, because nothing says serious governance like pledging fealty to a man who rage-posts foreign policy between golf rounds. Other Republicans are trying the daring line of "I’ll support Trump’s priorities but maybe not turn myself into a full-time Fox News prop," which in this party counts as radical independence. Greene, now out of office and out of the inner Trump circle, is discovering that when you build your entire career on a personality cult, the personality gets to decide when you stop existing.

So voters aren’t really choosing a representative; they’re choosing which flavor of Trumpism they want stamped on their ballot: the officially licensed "endorsed by Trump" brand or the off-label MAGA that dares to suggest the Dear Leader is not the sole owner of the "America First" trademark. Meanwhile, the district’s lack of actual representation in Congress is treated as a minor subplot to the only story that matters in the GOP: will the emperor’s thumbs-up still rule the kingdom, or is the base finally noticing he’s been winging it on tariffs, immigration, and now a war with Iran?

The Trump administration looked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the agency that forced credit bureaus to fix life-ruining errors — and decided the real problem in America was too much consumer protection. Enter Russell Vought, professional wrecking ball, who took over as acting CFPB director in 2025 and promptly slammed the brakes on nearly all agency work, tried to fire most of the staff, froze investigations, and helpfully dropped enforcement actions against, among others, TransUnion. One of the new lawyers leading this regulatory bonfire? A former Experian attorney. Regulatory capture isn’t a bug, it’s the onboarding process.

With the cop taken off the beat, Experian and TransUnion did what any responsible corporate citizen would do under Trump: they stopped fixing problems. Experian went from resolving nearly 20% of complaints in consumers’ favor in 2024 to under 1% the next year, while TransUnion’s relief rate fell by about half. Meanwhile, over 2.7 million credit reporting complaints have gone unanswered since Trump’s 2025 inauguration, leaving people unable to get housing, jobs, or loans because some algorithm decided they owe someone else’s $240,000 student loan. The administration’s solution was to help the bureaus lobby for shunting people away from the transparent CFPB complaint system into the companies’ own black box processes, where outcomes aren’t public at all. Truly a golden age for anyone who thinks the Constitution guarantees life, liberty, and the right of Experian to never admit a mistake.

Donald Trump saw the FBI and a federal grand jury poking around Arizona’s infamous Cyber Ninjas "audit" and his response was deep constitutional reflection and respect for the rule of law. Just kidding, he posted the story from a Trumpist outlet and yelled "Great!!!" like a guy who thinks subpoenas are just loyalty badges. Arizona senate president Warren Petersen, a man who has been wrong about the 2020 election for so long it’s basically his brand, confirmed the legislature got hit with a subpoena for records from the Maricopa clown audit and casually added that "the FBI has the records".

The same crew of election denial all-stars who tried to help Kari Lake overturn her loss — Kurt Olsen and Clay Parikh — are now tied to the Trump administration’s Fulton County, Georgia adventure, where the FBI raided an election office based on what a judge later described as specious claims. So now we’ve got the federal government chasing after a 2021 Arizona review run by Cyber Ninjas, a company with zero election experience that still managed to spend millions of donor dollars to confirm Joe Biden actually did a bit better than originally reported, then padded the report with debunked conspiracy filler.

Arizona AG Kris Mayes, apparently the last adult left in the building, notes that the 2020 results were "certified, litigated, and affirmed" and reminds everyone that Petersen has known this for years while happily mainlining fraud fantasies anyway. Her diagnosis of the Trump administration’s latest stunt is blunt: this isn’t law enforcement, it’s the weaponization of federal power to serve crackpots and lies. So yes, the guy who’s spent years screaming that the FBI is corrupt is now applauding as his own administration uses it as a delivery service for election denial fan fiction.

The Trump administration has apparently discovered a new constitutional doctrine: the Palestine Exception, where the First Amendment, due process, and basic human decency all mysteriously time out the second a Palestinian opens their mouth in public. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and Columbia grad, was arrested by ICE for the high crime of political advocacy, held for months, released, and is still being targeted for deportation. His friend Leqaa Kordia, another Palestinian activist, has spent nearly a year in ICE detention in Texas, including her second Ramadan behind bars, where the government that won’t shut up about “religious freedom” can’t even manage to provide halal food.

This isn’t immigration enforcement; it’s a speech-policing side hustle for an administration that treats Palestinians as a legal glitch to be patched out of the system. Khalil lays it out: when the subject is Palestine, due process is suspended, academic freedom is smashed, and constitutional protections evaporate like they were written in disappearing ink. The message from Trump’s DHS is simple: protest genocide, name U.S.-backed Israeli atrocities out loud, and you too can experience America’s proud tradition of indefinite detention in a fluorescent-lit warehouse.

The article sketches the full architecture of punishment: refugees whose families have already survived dispossession, occupation, and mass killing are now caged in Louisiana and Texas for daring to remember out loud. Their existence – educated, visible, ungrateful for “aid corridors” and “fragile ceasefires” – is treated as a national security threat. While the administration preaches about “campus antisemitism” and “law and order,” it’s quietly building a parallel system where the Constitution is optional and the only speech that’s truly free is the kind that flatters U.S. foreign policy.

The Trump administration has apparently discovered a bold new interpretation of the First Amendment: it only applies to people we like. A new lawsuit from Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute and Protect Democracy alleges that Trump, Marco Rubio’s State Department, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, and Kristi Noem’s DHS are running an official policy to deny visas to – or deport – noncitizen researchers who study social media, fact-checking, or so-called “censorship” online. Translation: if your work exposes disinformation or platform abuse, congratulations, you’re now a national security threat.

Researchers on H-1Bs, green cards, and other visas are reportedly canceling travel, scrubbing op-eds, and shelving books because they’re afraid that one peer-reviewed article on disinformation might get them tossed into detention and then onto a one-way flight out of the country. Meanwhile a State Department spokesperson, bravely anonymous, explains that “a visa is a privilege, not a right,” and that the U.S. doesn’t have to “suffer the presence” of people who allegedly “deny our citizens their Constitutional rights” – by studying how lies spread online. So the government screams about Big Tech “censorship,” then uses immigration law to censor the people studying it. Freedom, but make it deportable.

Donald Trump, currently cosplaying as a constitutional scholar from the back of Air Force One, has announced he will simply stop signing bills until Congress passes his latest voter suppression fever dream, the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act. The bill would radically overhaul voter registration by forcing eligible voters to cough up passports, birth certificates, and photo IDs — to solve the very real and urgent problem of a crime that is already illegal and statistically negligible, but tragically insufficient at keeping Democrats from winning elections.

On Truth Social, Trump declared, "I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed," essentially threatening a one-man legislative strike unless Congress agrees to help him kneecap the electorate before the 2026 midterms. He also cheered on Fox News calls to nuke the Senate filibuster — something he loves when it helps him entrench minority rule, and hates when Democrats suggest using it for, say, health care or voting rights. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is still pretending the filibuster is sacred, while Chuck Schumer has responded with a polite version of "enjoy your shutdown, buddy," promising Democrats won't touch the SAVE Act.

The fun twist: if Congress stays in session, bills become law after 10 days without Trump’s signature anyway, which means the big strong authoritarian move here might amount to the legislative equivalent of holding his breath until he turns orange-er. Meanwhile, no one at the White House will say whether this little extortion gambit applies to funding DHS or the Iran war supplemental — because nothing says responsible governance like threatening to jam the entire federal government until you can make it harder for people to vote you out.

Kari Lake just found out the hard way that you can’t cosplay as a Senate-confirmed official. A federal judge ruled that Lake unlawfully ran the US Agency for Global Media — the outfit that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and other pesky "journalism" operations that occasionally tell the truth about authoritarian governments, including ours.

Trump’s team tried to defund the agency, then handed Lake the keys anyway, Senate be damned. From July 31 to November 19 she rampaged through USAGM, cutting contracts and axing over 1,000 staff while operating in a role the court says violated both the Appointments Clause and the Vacancies Act. The judge — Reagan-appointed Royce Lamberth, so spare us the “woke Biden judge” routine — ruled that everything she did in that period has no force or effect. Translation: your mass layoff speedrun doesn’t count if you were never the boss.

Lake responded like any serious public servant confronted with a detailed constitutional ruling: by calling the decision “outrageous,” promising an appeal, and amplifying a post mocking the judge’s weight and blood sugar. Bold strategy to argue legal nuance by fat-shaming a Reagan appointee who just cited a Third Circuit precedent invalidating another Trump crony appointment (Alina Habba in New Jersey). Who needs law when you have insults and X reposts?

Meanwhile, the VOA journalists who sued — including White House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara — say they feel vindicated and are now trying to rebuild the agency so it can go back to producing journalism instead of audition tapes for state TV. Congress, for its part, responded to Trump and Lake’s attempted demolition by appropriating half a billion dollars more than Lake asked for. The authoritarian takeover of US international broadcasting is not going well, but the commitment to bumbling, unconstitutional sabotage remains truly world-class.