trump fans discover new hobby: menacing judges
Trump explains checks and balances: judges check him, his followers balance threats in their voicemail queue.
Federal judges are now holding Zoom panels to discuss the fun new workplace hazard of violent threats, because nothing says "healthy democracy" like needing the U.S. Marshals Service every time you sign an order Trump doesn’t like. Since October, there have been 314 threat investigations involving 202 judges — which is less a statistic and more a flashing siren that the rule of law is currently being held together with duct tape and denial.
Judge Ana Reyes, who blocked Trump’s attempt to strip Haitian immigrants of protected status and briefly told the military it couldn’t discriminate against transgender people, reports she gets a steady stream of death threats for the crime of reading the Constitution. Other judges describe the "extraordinary" becoming routine: every high-profile ruling now comes bundled with doxxing, threats, and, because why not, an odd campaign of anonymous pizza deliveries that may be tied to foreign actors. Judicial independence, brought to you by Domino’s.
Meanwhile, Trump and his allies have been busy teaching the base that judges who rule against him should be impeached, harassed, or both, while the Supreme Court spent last year quietly rubber-stamping Trump’s agenda in unsigned orders — then suddenly rediscovered the concept of limits by striking down his tariffs and earning his public tantrum. Chief Justice John Roberts has now emerged to gravely announce that personal attacks on judges "have got to stop," which is adorable coming from a court that helped supercharge this mess and only got concerned once the mob turned its attention upward.
#killing-democracy#fascism
senate fast-tracks bar-fight guy to run homeland security
Markwayne Mullin, freshly promoted from Senate slap-fights to running the nation’s largest security apparatus, rehearses his "have you tried punching your problems?" management philosophy.
The Senate homeland security committee has decided that what America really needs in charge of the largest domestic security apparatus on Earth is Markwayne Mullin, the senator best known for trying to square up with a witness in a hearing and romanticizing the neighbor who beat up Rand Paul. Almost every Republican on the panel voted yes, except Rand himself, apparently drawing the line at personally endorsing his own assault as official DHS conflict-resolution policy. John Fetterman crossed over to vote for Mullin, presumably on the theory that if we’re going to run the country like a WWE undercard, we might as well be honest about it.
Democrats pointed out some minor issues, like a Senate ethics report finding Mullin had "advocated physical violence as a means to resolve political disagreement" and his long, loving support for Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mullin, suddenly discovering his "diplomatic tone" setting, expressed regret over his remarks about Alex Pretti, one of two U.S. citizens killed by immigration agents during this year’s chaotic Minneapolis surge, and gently suggested DHS might want a lower public profile than Kristi Noem’s live-action Border Patrol cosplay.
On anything that actually matters, though, he stayed firmly on-brand. Asked whether he’d keep immigration agents away from polling stations during upcoming elections, Mullin refused to commit, because nothing says "free and fair democracy" like armed federal agents hanging around the ballot box. Questioned about specific immigration arrests, he claimed unfamiliarity, which is a neat trick for the guy interviewing to be the boss of the people doing the arresting. He did, however, bravely promise to require judicial warrants before agents enter homes or businesses, a standard that already exists, while ICE quietly plays with the idea that supervisor-signed paperwork is just as good as a judge.
So the Senate is on the verge of handing DHS to a first-term senator who treats political disagreement like a cage match, backs Trump’s immigration agenda, and won’t rule out turning the polling place into a soft-opening for the security state. The department is supposed to protect "homeland security"; instead, it’s looking more like the world’s largest experiment in how far you can stretch "law enforcement" before you snap democracy.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#lawlessness
ask a reporter about america’s friendly neighborhood occupation force
ICE agents helpfully demonstrating what “land of the free” looks like when you swap out liberty for tactical vests and qualified immunity.
America’s newest urban planning experiment—letting a bulked-up ICE occupy US cities like they’re Fallujah with strip malls—has gone so well it’s produced exactly what you’d expect: federal agents killing civilians like Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, and a high school student, Dylan Lopez Contreras, vanishing into a detention facility for ten months because nothing says "land of opportunity" like disappearing teenagers into federal cages.
While the government plays dress-up as an occupying army, actual communities are doing the job of grown-ups, banding together to protect their neighbors from the people in tactical gear who allegedly work for them. Maanvi Singh has been on the ground chronicling this little authoritarian field test, including a week on the block where Pretti was killed and the surreal process of watching a kid finally walk out of ICE detention as if he’s just completed a semester abroad in solitary.
The Guardian is now inviting readers to ask Singh questions about what it’s like to cover an agency that treats US cities as hunting grounds and residents as targets of opportunity. Because when federal power is this casually lethal and unaccountable, the least we can do is document the train wreck while it’s still barreling through the neighborhood.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
senator who tried to fight a witness now wants to run dhs, what could go wrong
Markwayne Mullin, auditioning to run DHS by demonstrating his core qualification: a deep commitment to televised tantrums.
President Trump has apparently decided that the ideal person to run the Department of Homeland Security is Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a man best known for trying to turn Senate hearings into UFC prelims. NPR notes that Sen. Richard Blumenthal got a crack at questioning Trump’s latest DHS cosplay nominee, which is Washington-speak for: "So, about your long public record of being a walking security risk with anger issues..."
Because nothing screams "steady hand on the nation’s security apparatus" like giving the keys to a guy whose brand is performative rage in committee rooms. Under Trump, DHS was already a catch‑all for border cruelty, protest crackdowns, and political theater; now we’re auditioning a MAGA senator to formalize the chaos. If confirmed, Mullin would inherit an agency Trump has repeatedly tried to bend into his personal domestic strike force — and judging by his past behavior, he seems less likely to resist that impulse than to ask for a folding chair and theme music.
#killing-democracy#awful-nominations
climate denier put in charge of disaster agency he keeps voting to starve
Markwayne Mullin, preparing to manage climate disasters by squinting at a hurricane map and voting against it.
Donald Trump’s latest fun experiment in disaster management is nominating Oklahoma senator and part-time climate skeptic Markwayne Mullin to run DHS, which oversees FEMA. Mullin reassured senators he won’t literally abolish FEMA like Kristi Noem wanted, he’ll just "restructure" it and keep talking about how federal workforces are "bloated" while refusing to say whether FEMA is actually overstaffed. This, while a GAO report says FEMA’s "limited workforce capacity" is already undermining national safety and the agency has hemorrhaged 10% of its staff, including irreplaceable senior experts. Perfect time to tighten the belt as the planet catches fire.
On paper, Mullin promises to stop Noem’s deranged policy of personally reviewing every FEMA expenditure over $100,000, and to maybe, someday, find a qualified FEMA administrator — a position Trump has left vacant for his entire second term. In practice, he’s a guy who questioned whether climate change exists, never served on a homeland security committee, and has publicly mused about whether FEMA should have any role in disaster preparedness at all. His big insight at the hearing was to confidently restate FEMA’s mission in a way that made actual FEMA officials wonder if he has ever read… anything.
Then there’s his voting record: Mullin opposed a 2024 bill to provide $20 billion to FEMA’s disaster relief fund and repeatedly voted against aid packages for Hurricane Sandy survivors, while now claiming FEMA "had a lot of problems" after Sandy like he’s the reformer we’ve all been waiting for. Longtime FEMA staff describe his hearing performance as a lot of vibes, zero vision. So Trump is handing control of America’s main disaster response agency to a man who doesn’t believe in the primary driver of modern disasters, doesn’t like funding disaster relief, and thinks states should mostly fend for themselves. Bold choice when the national emergency plan is already "hope the levees hold and pray Mar-a-Lago is uphill."
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
trump taps senate cage fighter to run protest‑shooting agency
Markwayne Mullin, seen here cosplaying as a serious lawmaker instead of a guy who challenges witnesses to cage matches, prepares to take over the agency that just shot protesters and called them terrorists.
The Department of Homeland Security, fresh off killing two US citizens at protests in Minnesota and branding them "domestic terrorists," is getting a new boss: Senator Markwayne Mullin, a former MMA fighter whose most famous Hill moment is challenging the Teamsters president to a brawl. So yes, the agency currently under fire for shooting protesters is being handed to a guy whose core competency is literally punching people for money. Truly a natural progression for Trump’s vision of “law and order.”
Kristi Noem, who oversaw the charmingly named Operation Metro Surge before it spiraled into lethal federal violence, was "sacked" and then immediately rewarded with a made‑up job as "Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas"—which sounds less like a diplomatic role and more like a Marvel knockoff you’d find in the bargain bin at Dollar Tree. In her place, Trump is nominating a first‑term senator whose main qualification is unwavering loyalty and a deep enthusiasm for locking up undocumented immigrants.
While DHS struggles with a funding impasse that’s leaving TSA understaffed and airports backed up for miles, the White House is laser‑focused on what really matters: installing a hyper‑partisan loyalist to run a sprawling internal security apparatus that includes CBP, ICE, TSA, the Secret Service, and FEMA. Protesters are being killed, dissenters are branded terrorists, and the guy who tried to start a fistfight in a Senate hearing is about to be in charge of the people with guns and badges. America’s longest‑running reality show, “Killing Democracy,” has clearly been renewed for another season.
#killing-democracy#fascism
illinois democrat runs on 'absolutely not, mr. trump'
Juliana Stratton, apparently the rare politician whose hiring policy for Trump appointees is a simple, elegant "absolutely not."
In Illinois, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton just won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate by making what now counts as a bold, radical promise in American politics: she will not help Donald Trump staff his authoritarian fan club. Among a crowded field of Democrats, Stratton basically said, "If it's a Trump appointee, the answer is no," which, in this timeline, passes for a comprehensive pro-democracy platform.
While Republicans are out here treating the Senate like LinkedIn Premium for extremists, grifters, and aspiring theocrats, Stratton is openly campaigning on the idea that maybe we don’t need to rubber-stamp every judge, saboteur, and lobbyist Trump digs out of a Heritage Foundation spreadsheet. Strongly opposing the Trump administration is now the minimum job requirement for anyone pretending to care about the Constitution, so congratulations to Illinois voters for at least reading the fine print before handing over the nuclear codes’ HR department.
#killing-democracy#losses
kari lake tries state tv cosplay, judge says 'absolutely not'
Kari Lake proudly displaying a photo of the newsroom she tried to turn into Trump TV before a federal judge reminded her that ‘media freedom’ isn’t just a chyron graphic.
Turns out you actually can’t just waltz into the U.S. Agency for Global Media, crown yourself Dear Leader, and put 1,042 Voice of America employees on ice because you’d prefer a more Trump-flavored propaganda channel. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered all those staffers back to work, calling Kari Lake’s attempt to gut VOA “arbitrary and capricious” — which is lawyer-speak for “you don’t get to smash a 1940s anti-Nazi institution just because you’re mad about fact-checking.”
Lamberth had already ruled last month that Lake unlawfully grabbed almost all the powers of the agency’s CEO and played musical titles with herself — senior adviser, “acting CEO” (a job she’s not legally eligible for), then deputy CEO — like a kid trying on Halloween costumes, except the costume was “unaccountable state media boss.” Now he’s added that she also blew off Congress’ intent for the agency’s funding and never bothered to consider what shutting down one of the world’s largest independent news broadcasters might do. Minor detail.
Under Lake’s guidance, the agency tried to ship VOA Director Michael Abramowitz off to a tiny shortwave facility in North Carolina and then fire him when he didn’t salute the exile order. Meanwhile, a network that used to reach 361 million people a week in 49 languages was hacked down to just six language services — an impressive achievement if your goal is to help authoritarian regimes by taking one of their few remaining irritants off the air. Lake, naturally, calls the rulings “judicial activism,” because nothing screams limited government like unilaterally dismantling a congressionally funded news outlet founded to counter Nazi propaganda.
Voice of America once modeled what journalism in a pluralistic democracy looks like: reporting both Allied victories and defeats to build credibility. The Trump-Lake version of that model appears to be: fire everyone, hollow out the newsroom, cancel Reuters and AP, and see how close you can get to a taxpayer-funded campaign channel before a federal judge yanks the plug. For now, the courts have reminded the White House that “state media” is a fantasy, not a job description.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
‘apparently i’m an idiot’ is the new trump 2024 bumper sticker
A Pennsylvania Trump voter stares into the camera, realizing too late that bombing Iran and cheap gas don’t usually come in the same package.
NBC finds a three-time Trump voter in Pennsylvania who has finally connected the galaxy-brain dots between "tough on Iran" chest-thumping and paying more to fill up his F-150. After backing Trump through three election cycles, the man looks at the Iran war, looks at gas prices, and concludes: “Apparently I’m an idiot.” The good news is he’s right. The bad news is the rest of us are stuck living in the foreign policy demolition derby he helped buy.
This is the MAGA hangover tour: voters who cheered on "maximum pressure" and "America First" are now discovering that when a president treats war like a Fox News segment break, it has consequences beyond the rally merch table. While Trump is reportedly being handed off-ramps from the Iran war like it’s a Costco sample aisle, people back home are just now realizing that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t put a chronically unserious reality TV landlord in charge of nuclear-adjacent geopolitics.
So now we get the confessionals. "Apparently I’m an idiot" is less a personal reflection and more a national epitaph for the era where voters believed a guy who went bankrupt selling steaks would magically lower gas prices while lobbing missiles in the Middle East. The Iran war is grinding on, the costs are piling up, and the only real lesson learned is that there’s no refund policy on electing a chaos goblin as commander in chief.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid#imperialism
trump’s save america act tries to save america from voters
Senate Republicans bravely defending democracy from the terrifying threat of… people voting without their birth certificates on them.
Senate Republicans have kicked off debate on Trump’s beloved SAVE America Act, a bill that promises to "secure" elections by making it a lot harder for the wrong people — i.e., non-Republicans — to vote. The plan: force every American to cough up a passport or birth certificate just to register, demand photo ID even to vote by mail, and hand the Department of Homeland Security a handy new tool to flag "suspected non-citizens" for states to purge from the rolls. Nothing says small government like turning DHS into a national voter-screening squad.
The bill needs 60 votes, doesn’t have them, and everyone knows it. John Thune is promising an "extended debate" on Trump’s "No. 1 priority" that has approximately the same chance of passing as Trump has of reading it. Even the fantasy add-ons Trump wants — gutting mail voting and tossing in culture-war bonuses like bans on transgender athletes and gender-affirming care for minors — are doomed, because those amendments also need 60 votes. It’s less a legislative strategy and more a Fox News programming block accidentally printed as a bill.
Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, are calling it "a naked attempt to rig our elections" and say they’ll block it, while Republicans desperately wave around the one popular piece — photo ID — like it magically justifies the rest of the suppression machinery. Mike Lee, never one to miss an authoritarian cosplay opportunity, is already threatening primary challengers for any Republican who won’t burn down the Senate rules with a talking filibuster to push this thing. Thune, in a rare moment of lucidity, notes that maybe nuking your own incumbents to pass a dead-on-arrival bill could, tiny detail, cost them their majority.
So the Senate is now spending days pretending this has a future, so Trump can brag that his top priority is "on the floor" while everyone involved quietly admits it’s going nowhere. It’s not governance; it’s a live-action voter suppression infomercial, subsidized by your tax dollars, with DHS auditioning for the role of National Voter Purge Hotline.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump tells unpaid tsa to keep working, promises thoughts and prayers on back pay
Passengers snake through a two-hour TSA line while Congress experiments with a new governance model called "what if we just don’t pay anyone?"
Congress is now treating airport security like a subscription service they forgot to renew. DHS is in its second month of a shutdown because Democrats are refusing to fund the department without reforms after federal immigration agents shot and killed two US citizens in Minneapolis. Republicans, naturally, have responded to this tiny request to stop killing Americans in the street by blocking any attempt to fund the non-immigration parts of DHS, including TSA. So TSA officers are "essential" enough to grope your shampoo but not essential enough to get a paycheck.
Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport, is now hosting two-hour security lines, Houston is clocking in at 90–100 minutes, and more than 300 TSA agents have quit because it turns out you can’t pay rent with patriotic vibes. The average TSA salary is about $35,000, fuel costs are spiking thanks to the US–Israel war in Iran, and officers are being told to keep showing up indefinitely for the low, low wage of zero dollars. As AFGE president Everett Kelley politely explains, workers are being treated as expendable meat shields so Congress can cosplay as tough on immigration.
Democrats tried the radical move of funding TSA and other non-immigration DHS agencies separately; Republicans said no, because if you can’t use people’s safety as leverage to preserve a brutal enforcement machine that just killed two citizens, what even is the point of power? Airline CEOs are now begging Congress to stop turning air travel into a live-action shutdown drill. And Donald Trump, broadcasting from Truth Social, has chimed in to urge TSA agents to "go to work" and promises he will never forget them. Which is convenient, since forgetting to pay them appears to be official policy.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
trump discovers deepfakes, declares reality fake
Trump, moments before explaining that every video of him ever made was actually rendered on a Hillary-owned supercomputer in Ukraine.
Donald Trump has accused the BBC of using "AI-generated" clips of him, because when you’ve spent years on camera confessing things, threatening people, and blurting out crimes like a malfunctioning Roomba, eventually you need a new excuse. The new plan: whenever an unflattering clip appears, just scream "deepfake" and hope your followers treat it like the 11th Commandment.
This isn’t about tech literacy; it’s about building a permission structure for permanent denial. If every real video can be waved away as "AI," then no incriminating tape, no damning admission, no on-camera authoritarian rant can ever be used to hold him accountable. It’s the perfect arrangement for a guy whose greatest enemy is playback. Who needs state media when you can just declare all non-state media digitally forged?
So while normal people are worrying about AI cheating on tests and stealing artwork, Trump is pioneering the strongman use case: turn a real, serious technological threat into a universal alibi. Conveniently, the only footage that will remain unquestionably authentic is whatever comes from his own propaganda outlets—just a total coincidence, of course.
#killing-democracy#fascism#full-stupid
trump’s doj discovers grand juries have a spine, judge installs warning light
Jeanine Pirro at DOJ, moments before explaining that she’s “willing to take a no true bill” as long as she can keep shoveling Trump’s enemies into the grand jury furnace.
The Trump administration’s crusade to criminalize disobedience to illegal orders hit a small snag: a federal grand jury in D.C. refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers for the grave offense of posting a video reminding the military they don’t have to follow unlawful commands. Chief Judge James Boasberg responded by creating a new policy requiring that the court be notified whenever a grand jury refuses to play along with the administration’s prosecution fantasies, so there’s an official record every time Jeanine Pirro’s office tries to turn the Justice Department into Trump’s personal firing squad and gets laughed out of the room.
Boasberg’s order forces grand jury forepersons to report failed indictments under seal, ensuring the judiciary can track how often prosecutors are swinging wildly at political enemies and missing. This follows Pirro’s team failing to convince a single grand juror that telling soldiers not to follow illegal orders is “seditious behavior” worthy of death, despite Trump loudly demanding those lawmakers be arrested and tried for a capital crime because they hurt his feelings on social media.
Not satisfied with just criminalizing basic constitutional literacy, Pirro also went after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with subpoenas so nakedly political that Boasberg torched them as an effort to “harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the president or to resign.” Pirro called him an “activist judge,” because in Trumpworld, a judge who stops you from abusing state power for Dear Leader is obviously the radical one. Meanwhile, her office quietly dropped a case against a man who burned an American flag after Boasberg raised the awkward question of whether the prosecution was about alleged park violations or that pesky First Amendment. The grand jury system was designed as a shield against exactly this kind of government overreach, and Trump and Pirro are furious to discover that sometimes the shield still works.
#killing-democracy#fascism
john roberts begs the arsonist to stop yelling at the fire department
Trump, moments after discovering that even a handpicked 6–3 Supreme Court occasionally reads the Constitution.
Chief Justice John Roberts went to Rice University and politely asked America’s most famous aspiring strongman to please, if it’s not too much trouble, stop personally targeting judges. He didn’t say Trump’s name, of course — just gently observed that "personally directed hostility" toward judges is "dangerous" and "has got to stop," as though the problem here is a minor vibes issue and not the sitting president screaming at the judiciary like it’s The Apprentice finale.
Trump, for his part, spent the weekend on Truth Social calling the Supreme Court a "weaponized and unjust Political Organization" that "RANSACKED" the country by striking down his sweeping tariffs. This, from the guy who got a 6-3 conservative court, then lost a 6-3 ruling where two of his own appointees — Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — joined Roberts in telling him that, shockingly, the president does not get to run trade policy like a yard sale.
Not content with trashing the Supreme Court, Trump also went after Judge James Boasberg, calling him "Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control" for rulings the administration doesn’t like, including blocking a DOJ probe into Jerome Powell. Some Republicans are already floating impeachment, because why merely disagree with a judge’s ruling when you can try to remove him for insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader?
Roberts has issued careful statements defending Boasberg and warning everyone to "dial down the temperature," while lower court judges quietly note that maybe, just maybe, a coordinated campaign to delegitimize the judiciary and threaten judges requires more than a strongly worded press release and a sigh. The American experiment is being stress-tested by a president calling judges enemies of the country, and the chief justice’s big counter-move is: asking nicely.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump offers citizenship fire sale while trying to cancel it at home
State Department window helpfully labeled: ‘Citizenship: Returns Desk →, No New Members ←’
The Trump administration has discovered one government service it does want to subsidize: helping people dump their US citizenship and run. The State Department is slashing the renunciation fee from $2,350 down to $450, below cost, so Washington can lose money processing a record wave of "get me out of here" paperwork. There’s a 30,000-case global backlog of people waiting to swear they never have to file with the IRS again, and Trump’s team has bravely stepped up to… make that line move faster.
This generosity, of course, is reserved for the kind of folks who can afford lawyers and offshore tax advice. The policy is framed as helping "accidental Americans" abroad navigate absurd tax rules, but the IRS’s own "expatriation list" only tracks those with a net worth above $2 million. So yes, the US is officially offering a discounted exit package to the global upper crust, while pretending this is all about bureaucratic compassion. Think of it as a loyalty program where the reward points are for leaving.
Meanwhile, as the administration makes it cheaper for people overseas to stop being American, it’s in court trying to stop people born here from ever being American in the first place. Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship is now headed to the supreme court, where the administration is seeking to rewrite the 14th amendment by vibes and Fox News segments. So the new doctrine is simple: if you’re rich and already a citizen, the government will underwrite your escape. If you’re poor and born here to non-citizen parents, the president would like a legal path to erase you.
US passports have already fallen out of the world’s top 10, now sitting in a proud tie with Malaysia, and the administration’s response is to accelerate the brain-and-asset drain while chipping away at who even counts as American. It’s an elegant system: hollow out the value of citizenship, subsidize the exit of the wealthy, and wage war on the constitutional guarantee for everyone else. Make America Great Again, by making it easier to leave and harder to belong.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#oligarchy
fcc chair auditions to run trump tv, threatens to cancel reality
Brendan Carr, pretending the FCC is his personal Ministry of Truth while polishing his Trump lapel pin and pointing at a map of Iran he definitely hasn’t read.
Donald Trump rage-posts on Truth Social about US media covering attacks on American tanker aircraft in Saudi Arabia, and FCC chair Brendan Carr sprints into the comments like a very eager hall monitor promising to yank broadcast licenses for airing what he calls "fake news." For extra groveling, Carr throws in a line about Trump’s "landslide election victory" – because nothing says independent regulator like cosplaying as the campaign’s deputy press secretary with subpoena power.
The problem, besides all of it, is that Carr knows this is legally garbage. He’s spent years trying to turn the FCC into Trump’s personal content-policing squad: going after late-night comedians, talk shows, public broadcasters, and any outlet that hurts Dear Leader’s feelings, all while literally scrubbing the word "independent" from the FCC website. Every time he screams "distortion" or "not in the public interest," it just happens to target someone who wasn’t sufficiently reverent toward the man whose face is on his lapel pin.
And yet, the emptiness of the threats is the point. Station owners don’t want to spend millions fighting the regime’s favorite bootlicker or risk merger delays, so they cave: spike stories, sand down headlines, and quietly decide that maybe they don’t need quite so much reporting on Iran, dead soldiers, or the Trump administration’s total absence of a plan. We’ve already seen this with KCBS in California, where managers killed interviews that might be "anti-Trump" after Carr launched an investigation. The message is simple: cover the war like Pete Hegseth wants, or the FCC may come for your license over a headline Trump doesn’t like.
That’s how you slide from a free press to something that looks a lot more like Iran’s state TV: obedient outlets, patriotic cheerleading, and wall-to-wall propaganda for the supreme leader and his wars. Republicans mostly shrug, Democrats mumble, and Carr keeps road-testing his dream job as programming director for Trump State Television. Freedom of the press dies not with a bang, but with a regulator whining about "treasonous" headlines on social media.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
stable genius discovers new constitutional requirement: no dyslexics allowed
Trump, a man who treats reading like a contact sport, mocking Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia from behind the Resolute Desk.
Donald Trump, a man who struggles heroically with the English language in every medium known to humankind, has announced that other people’s brain wiring is disqualifying for the presidency. Mocking California Governor Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia, Trump told reporters he’s “all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president,” and declared that presidents “should not have learning disabilities,” while repeatedly calling Newsom “Gavin Newscum” and “dumb” from the Oval Office like a very stable middle-school bully.
The National Center for Learning Disabilities, apparently still laboring under the illusion that the presidency should not be run on eugenics vibes, condemned Trump’s remarks and gently reminded America that dyslexia doesn’t affect intelligence, judgment, or the ability to lead — a list of qualities Trump might want to borrow from someone with a learning disability. Researchers have even suggested that past presidents like George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Woodrow Wilson may have had dyslexia, which means Trump’s new purity test would have flunked some of the country’s foundational leaders while somehow grandfathering in the guy who can’t spell “Gavin Newsom.”
Newsom, for his part, responded by roasting Trump online and noting that he spoke candidly about his dyslexia — a nuance that Trump translated into “can’t read, has a mental disorder – A Cognitive Mess!” on Truth Social, which continues to function as the world’s least helpful neurological clinic. So we now have a president who bombs children, protects abusers, and openly suggests that tens of millions of Americans are unfit to hold the office he’s currently defiling — but sure, the real problem is the dyslexic guy who doesn’t read speeches off a teleprompter.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america#full-stupid
hipaa is for losers, says guy with nuclear codes
Trump explains a congressman’s private medical file on live TV while the Speaker of the House remembers, too late, that indoor voices exist.
Trump held a White House press conference that was allegedly about the Kennedy Center and Iran, but quickly devolved into a live-action HIPAA violation. Sitting next to Speaker Mike Johnson, he prodded him into discussing Rep. Neal Dunn’s serious health issues and then just blurted out that Dunn had a "terminal" diagnosis and "would be dead by June"—prompting Johnson to mutter the quiet part out loud: "That wasn’t public."
Because nothing says "functioning democracy" like the president using a congressman’s near-death experience as content, Trump went on to specify it was a heart problem and brag that he personally got Dunn in with White House doctors for a "long operation" and "more stents". The subtext wasn’t subtle: your heart may be failing, but your real job is propping up a one-seat Republican majority. Human being with a family becomes expendable vote count with stents installed by the executive branch.
Johnson dutifully cleaned up the mess by assuring everyone that Dunn now has "more energy than a man half his age", like a refurbished congressman fresh off the factory line. Meanwhile Dunn, who has decided not to seek re-election, is offstage while the president casually narrates his medical chart to the nation for political effect. Privacy, dignity, boundaries—quaint concepts from before the era when your personal health status is just another prop in Trump’s ongoing reality show about clinging to power.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
white house turns cancer diagnosis into deep state fanfic
Susie Wiles at the White House, flanked by officials who see every human event as another exhibit in the Case of Trump v. Reality.
Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff and long-time architect of his political career, has been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and says she’ll keep running the chaos factory while undergoing treatment. On the human level: that’s serious, it’s scary, and like everyone else in that situation, she deserves competent medical care and a full recovery.
Then the Trump White House did what the Trump White House does: turned a private health crisis into branded content for the persecution-industrial complex. Trump hopped onto Truth Social to declare her prognosis “excellent” and assure everyone she’ll be putting in “virtually full time” at the White House, because this administration treats cancer like a minor scheduling inconvenience but climate change like a suggestion.
While most officials managed a basic level of humanity, deputy chief of staff James Blair decided the moment called for some fanfic about the Deep State Cinematic Universe. In a single post, he claimed Wiles had bravely battled through “illegitimate indictments, domestic spying by the former administration, rigged federal prosecutions, illegal law enforcement raids, general lawfare, assassination attempts, & more” — an impressive list of things that are either under criminal investigation, made up, or both. Apparently the message is: your boss is the victim of a vast criminal conspiracy, but also definitely in charge of the country, don’t think too hard about it.
So while Wiles faces a disease that affects one in eight women, the people around her are still laser-focused on the truly important thing: using literally anything — including a cancer diagnosis — to fuel Trump’s narrative that the justice system, the media, and basic reality are all part of an illegitimate plot against him. The prognosis for American democracy remains somewhat less “excellent.”
#killing-democracy#fascism
oakland refuses to die for trump’s campaign ad
Scene from Oakland, the city Trump swore was beyond saving, stubbornly refusing to collapse for his next law-and-order press conference.
Donald Trump spent the summer of 2025 fantasizing about sending the National Guard into Democratic cities like it was his own personal cosplay of martial law, declaring places like Oakland "so far gone" they were basically write-offs. Minor plot twist: while he was on camera doing his best dystopian voiceover, Oakland was quietly recording its lowest homicide total in 25 years, cutting murders in half from their 2021 peak without needing tanks, tear gas, or a presidential tantrum.
Instead of federal stormtroopers, the city relied on boring, un-televised things: community groups like Urban Peace Movement, investment in neglected neighborhoods, coordination between local departments, and actual relationships with the people most at risk of violence. So naturally, the Trump administration is now lunging for credit, pointing to its immigration crackdowns and "tough on crime" theatrics while Oakland leaders politely note that federal meddling has mostly made things worse. Reality: local organizers, residents, and some cops doing the slow, grinding work of prevention. Narrative from DC: "We scared everybody straight with fascist vibes, you're welcome."
None of this means Oakland is a utopia – East and West Oakland still bear the brunt of shootings, and one mass shooting can erase a year’s worth of feel-good graphs for the families living through it. But the city’s experience blows up Trump’s favorite campaign B‑roll of "Democrat-run hellholes" and replaces it with something far less useful to him: a story about communities reducing violence with resources, not crackdowns; cooperation, not occupation. No wonder he keeps pretending it’s a war zone. Peace is terrible for the brand.
#killing-democracy#fascism
