U.S.S. Liberty, now serving as a floating Rorschach test for whichever right-wing grifter needs content this week.
The American right has discovered the U.S.S. Liberty, a 1967 Israeli attack that killed 34 U.S. service members, and decided it’s not a tragedy or a historical dispute but a personality test for authoritarian fanboys. On one side, you’ve got Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, and Rich Lowry loudly insisting it was all a tragic mix-up, generously aligning their historical analysis with the official positions of both governments and their own donor base.
On the other side, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Paul Gosar have decided the Liberty is proof that Israel is an enemy of America, helpfully packaging legitimate questions about a murky incident with openly antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy sludge. The result: a six-decade-old naval disaster has been repurposed as a secret handshake inside Trump’s movement, where your take on a 1967 attack is really just a proxy for whether you’re a Christian Zionist hawk, a nationalist isolationist, or just deeply committed to hating Jews in new and exciting ways. Policy, strategy, actual alliances? Those are for democracies that still pretend to govern.
Trump dreams of running every election in America, surrounded by a lineup of secretary of state candidates auditioning to be assistant regional manager of voter suppression.
Trump is back in office, still lying about 2020, and now wants to "nationalize" elections — because if there’s one man you want in charge of every ballot in America, it’s the guy who tried to strong-arm Georgia into "finding" votes like they were lost car keys. While the Constitution says states run elections, the president is out here fantasizing about a federal takeover, and his administration is helpfully underscoring the point with FBI raids on local election hubs and federal lawsuits over voter rolls.
In Arizona, the GOP’s leading candidate for secretary of state is Alexander Kolodin — a proud member of Trump’s fake elector scheme and a walking conflict-of-interest case study who tried to sue Arizona out of recognizing Biden’s win. Trump hasn’t formally endorsed him, but Kolodin’s website features a glowing presidential review calling him “one hell of an attorney,” which is certainly one way to describe someone who worked to overturn an election. Democrats, meanwhile, are reduced to running on the radical notion that elections should be real and count the actual votes.
Georgia, the site of Trump’s famous "find 11,780 votes" audition tape, is now hosting a secretary of state race shaped by an FBI search of a Fulton County election hub. Brad Raffensperger — who once mildly resisted a coup and is now treated as a hero for doing the bare minimum of not committing felonies — is running for governor, and his would-be successors are a mix of "please don’t federalize this" Republicans like Gabriel Sterling and Trump-pilled loyalists like Vernon Jones, who calls himself “the Black Donald Trump” and then acts accordingly by refusing to say whether he supports Trump’s nationalization fantasy while hinting that something must be wrong if the FBI has questions.
Democrats in multiple battleground states are campaigning on the quaint idea that elections should be free, fair, and not centrally managed by the guy who keeps insisting they’re rigged when he loses. Republicans, for their part, are largely running on "concerns" about 2020 and a shared commitment to backing Trump’s lies while pretending this is all about "election integrity." The bad news: the election denial movement now has the White House, a DOJ willing to poke at local election offices, and a bench of secretary of state candidates eager to hold the keys to the ballot box. The good news: at least they’re saying the quiet part out loud now.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, confidently demonstrating how to do state terror but with a press release and a legal memo.
Janine di Giovanni, who used to document actual dictators – Assad, Saddam, Sisi, Putin – is now looking at the US and Israel and going: yep, this is starting to rhyme. After decades of watching masked men drag people from their homes and regimes build hotels over mass graves, she’s seeing the upgraded Western version: the same terror logic, just run through a legal department and a PR firm.
Instead of midnight knocks from secret police, we get ICE raids wrapped in the language of "order" and "procedure". Instead of a state TV stooge, we get a CBS boss whose politics align beautifully with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead of openly murdering journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, we discipline reporters with "editorial policy" – and then, when that’s not enough, we start arresting them and flirting with calling them enemies of the state. Democracy, but make it plausible deniability.
Campus life, once about reading books and discovering bad beer, is now a soft launch for surveillance states. Universities photograph and catalogue pro-Palestinian students like they’re shoplifters, whisper that Wall Street and top law firms will blacklist them, and help ICE try to deport the especially inconvenient ones. Deans are threatened with funding cuts unless they install ideologically convenient “antisemitism” trainings that students say are just pro-Israel propaganda with a quiz at the end.
The genius of the modern "democratic" terror state is that everything is technically legal. Courts still exist, elections still happen, the press is "free" – while CEOs, academics, and journalists quietly pre-censor themselves, obeying in advance like Timothy Snyder’s warning label come to life. The masks may be off, but the methods are familiar: make people scared enough, compliant enough, and eventually you don’t need to announce the repression. It just seeps into the machinery and starts calling itself normal.
Minneapolis police bravely confront the terrifying threat of candles, cardboard signs, and a guy holding a pizza box.
In Minneapolis, the Trump administration’s immigration crusade has reached the "arrest people mourning the dead" phase of law and order. Protesters marking one month since ICE officer(s) shot and killed 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good outside her home gathered near the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building. Police responded to this dangerous mix of candles, grief, and constitutional rights by declaring the assembly unlawful and hauling people off the sidewalk, including a guy whose radical crime was delivering pizza.
Good was killed after ICE boxed in her SUV and an officer standing in front of her car opened fire at close range as it moved forward. The Trump administration immediately branded her a "domestic terrorist" who tried to run over an officer, a story state and local officials politely filed under "absolutely not." Weeks later, Alex Pretti was shot dead by immigration officers during a street scuffle after they noticed a gun he was legally licensed to carry. Two dead, both caught on bystander video, both now symbols of Trump’s "public safety" campaign that keeps killing the public.
Border czar Tom Homan, apparently confusing Minnesota for a hostile foreign province, announced he’d graciously pull 700 immigration officers out of the state—only a quarter of the federal occupation force—after local officials agreed to help turn over arrested immigrants. No timeline on when the crackdown ends, because why let a crisis go to waste when you can squeeze more compliance out of terrified communities. Meanwhile, hundreds gathered in a park for a ceremony led by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, honoring Good and Pretti while Becca Good reminded the country that there are many more victims whose names we don’t know yet, quietly ground up in Trump’s deportation machine.
So to recap: ICE kills two people, the White House smears one as a terrorist, local cops arrest the people protesting the killings, and the feds negotiate how much cooperation they can extract in exchange for dialing back the siege. Truly a shining example of how to run an immigration system if your policy goals are fear, silence, and a body count.
Tulsi Gabbard, hard at work transforming the Office of the Director of National Intelligence into the Office of Protecting the President From Inconvenient Phone Calls.
The NSA reportedly picks up an "unusual" phone call between a foreign intelligence figure and someone close to Donald Trump, flags it up the chain, and then watches in horror as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard treats it like a hot gossip item for the West Wing. Instead of letting the NSA distribute the intel through normal channels, Gabbard allegedly prints it out and hand-delivers it to Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, then orders the agency not to publish the report and to send everything straight to her office. National security process, meet Office Politics: Executive Edition.
A whistleblower, apparently under the impression that laws still apply, files an "urgent concern" complaint in April and a formal one in May. By June, the acting IG Tamara A Johnson shrugs and declares she "could not determine" if the allegations are credible, but magnanimously notes the whistleblower can go to Congress… after getting guidance from the very DNI they’re accusing. Conveniently, Gabbard then parks one of her top advisers, Dennis Kirk, inside the supposedly independent watchdog’s office. Totally normal oversight structure, nothing capture-y about it at all.
For eight months, the complaint and the underlying intel are locked down, redacted to oblivion, and smothered under claims of executive privilege, because nothing says "this is fine" like invoking presidential secrecy over a mystery call involving foreign intel and a Trump-world insider. The "gang of eight" finally gets a heavily blacked-out version in February, well past the 21-day statutory deadline that Senator Mark Warner helpfully reminds everyone still exists on paper. Republicans like Tom Cotton rush to declare that Gabbard handled everything "appropriately", while Democrats point out that burying a whistleblower complaint for most of a year is not actually in the job description.
Now Congress is trying to pry the original NSA intel directly from the agency, the whistleblower’s lawyer Andrew Bakaj is publicly begging ODNI to follow the law, and the DNI’s office is ghosting his letters like a bad Tinder date. The administration’s message is clear: if intelligence suggests uncomfortable questions about Trump’s orbit and foreign services, the real national security priority is protecting the president’s political flank, not the country. America’s intelligence system has been repurposed into a personal damage-control shop, and they’re not even subtle about it.
Melania takes a call, presumably to confirm the check from Bezos cleared before she continues pretending this is a documentary and not a $70m campaign ad.
Amazon drops $70m on a Melania Trump documentary covering the 20 days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration and, shockingly, it’s not a hard-hitting exploration of fascism so much as a glossy brochure for life in the gilded bunker. The box office haul? $7m – which in Trumpworld apparently counts as a roaring success, making it the top documentary of the decade and also a spectacular way for Jeff Bezos to light piles of money on fire in exchange for the faint hope of regime goodwill.
Republican women, meanwhile, are treating this like Barbie for people who think Stephen Miller is a serious policy mind. In Austin, they show up to the AMC in “what would Melania wear?” power suits and leather pants, turning state propaganda into girls’ night while Cecilia Abbott, wife of Greg Abbott, slips in with a security detail like she’s attending the Met Gala instead of a 2-hour soft-focus ad for authoritarian chic. Former Trump press secretary turned Fox fog machine Kayleigh McEnany brags her mom’s screening was “standing room only”, helpfully confirming she has no idea how movie theaters or basic counting work.
The audience is, predictably, older, white, and very into the idea that watching a carefully curated, context-free portrait of Melania’s outfits and “vulnerability” is the same thing as engaging with history. Influencers from the conservative “womanosphere” push it as must-see content for tradwives, while Katie Miller somehow blames South Africa for pulling the film because they’re “biased against white people” – a bold take from the spouse of the guy who built family separation as a lifestyle brand. It’s all pitched as a story of grace under pressure, with the minor omission that the pressure largely comes from the administration dismantling democracy in the background.
So yes, while the rest of us remember child separation, coups, and open contempt for the rule of law, Amazon is out here funding a Jackie Kennedy cosplay reel for a first lady who spent four years decorating the White House like a Slavic horror maze. State-aligned billionaires pumping out prestige propaganda for an aging base desperate to feel persecuted and glamorous at the same time – what could possibly go wrong?
The State Department, where even the sign out front may soon require a FOIA request to verify it ever existed.
The State Department has decided that history is need-to-know, and the public does not need to know. All posts on its official X accounts from before Trump’s glorious second coming on Jan. 20, 2025 — including from Obama, Biden, and Trump’s own first term — are being wiped from public view and shoved into an internal archive. If you want to see what your government said in the recent past, you can now enjoy the uniquely American experience of filing a FOIA request and waiting months to maybe learn what was once a public tweet.
This is not an isolated clerical tidy-up; it’s part of the administration’s larger "Delete Anything That Makes Us Look Bad Or Real" program. Environmental and health data? Scrubbed. Mentions of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities? Vanished. National park signs that admit slavery happened? Gone. References to Trump’s impeachments at the National Portrait Gallery? Erased. In their place: a White House "revisionist history" of Jan. 6 and a COVID page titled "Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19", because why have science when you can have fan fiction?
A State Department spokesperson swears this is all about avoiding "confusion" and "speaking with one voice" to advance the President’s "America First" goals. Translation: if it didn’t serve the current cult narrative, it goes behind the curtain. Public-facing records are out; curated propaganda feeds are in. The history is technically "preserved," they insist — just not where the public, journalists, or foreign audiences can see it without legal gymnastics. You know, the kind of transparent, accountable diplomacy you expect from a government that keeps needing to reassure everyone it’s definitely not sliding into authoritarianism.
Le Pen, Orbán, and friends waiting for the next tranche of moral support from Washington’s Department of Export-Grade Authoritarianism.
European leaders are apparently worried Trump might invade a NATO ally or hand the continent to Putin, which is adorable, because the actual plan is much cheaper: just help elect a bunch of homegrown mini-Trumps and call it a "second American revolution." The new U.S. National Security Strategy literally name-checks far-right parties like Reform UK, AfD, Le Pen’s RN, Fidesz, and Vox as "patriotic" partners, because nothing says safeguarding freedom like using state power to boost movements with ex–neo-Nazi intellectuals on the payroll.
This "new right" isn’t pretending to be nostalgic anymore; it’s proudly hyper-modern, exploiting every crisis from 2008 to Covid to Ukraine as proof that liberal democracy is a failed product and only ethnonational border fetishism can save us. The formula is simple: turn borders into moral sorting hats, tariffs into culture-war cosplay, foreign policy into "what’s in it for us," and any institutional oversight into a sinister "deep state" conspiracy. Then have Elon Musk and friends launder it all through an algorithmic funhouse where "free speech" means infinite disinfo, and obscure activists become martyrs in a parallel reality most normal people don’t even see.
Mainstream parties, being extremely good at losing, either ignore the threat or try to copy the rhetoric on migration and identity, which naturally just makes the originals look more authentic. Meanwhile, Trump and JD Vance are busy turning the U.S. government into an international far-right venture capital fund, underwriting parties that exist to dismantle the very liberal order NATO was built to protect. So no, Europe doesn’t need to fear an American tank division rolling through Berlin; it needs to worry about Washington sending memes, money, and moral support to the people who want to shut democracy down from the inside.
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth heroically protects America from the grave national security threat of people who read books at Harvard.
Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend host currently LARPing as defense secretary, has announced that the Pentagon will cut off all military training, fellowships and certificate programs with Harvard because it’s too "woke" and allegedly full of "Hate America activism". A proud Harvard graduate himself, Hegseth bravely omitted the part where he cashed in on a Kennedy School master’s degree before deciding that higher education is treason.
This isn’t just a tantrum about campus politics; it’s the Trump administration turning the Defense Department into an ideological enforcement arm. Hegseth says the Pentagon’s focus on "building lethality" means no more "millions of dollars" for "expensive universities" that don’t sufficiently worship the troops or the Dear Leader, and he’s ordering all branches to review every Ivy League and civilian grad program for active-duty service members. Translation: if your university teaches anything beyond flag worship and culture-war talking points, the pipeline of military students and funding is on the chopping block.
The same guy who once theatrically defaced his Harvard diploma on Fox & Friends – then immediately admitted it was just a stunt and that, yes, he’s still keeping the degree – is now using the Pentagon to make that stunt national policy. The message to the officer corps is clear: loyalty to Trumpist ideology outranks professional education. "We train warriors, not wokesters," Hegseth sneers, as the world’s most powerful military is methodically rewired to fear critical thinking more than actual enemies.
Trump, mid-rant, explaining how if you just change all the rules and never admit defeat, you never technically lose an election.
Trump is reportedly workshopping his 2026-era election tantrums into something Republicans can politely nod along to, like turning a full-blown coup attempt into a tasteful policy white paper. Instead of just screaming that every election he doesn’t win is rigged, he’s now trying to "channel" those grievances into proposals GOP officials can back without having to say the quiet part (we don’t accept losing) out loud.
One of the big ideas floating around: nationalizing elections, i.e., handing more power over how votes are run and counted to the same guy who tried to strong-arm Georgia into "finding" votes and sent a mob to the Capitol. Republicans, who spent decades shrieking about states’ rights, are suddenly discovering that their whole federalism cosplay clashes badly with their new enthusiasm for election control from Dear Leader. It’s creating what NBC politely calls "a problem for Republicans" and what normal people might recognize as the ongoing project of dismantling free and fair elections.
So the party is now stuck trying to translate Trump’s never-ending list of personal grudges into something that sounds like an agenda instead of a confession. They don’t want to alienate his base by admitting the 2020 Big Lie was, in fact, a lie, but they also don’t really want to put their names on an open blueprint for future election subversion. The result is the usual GOP compromise: pretend this is all about "election integrity" while quietly workshopping how much democracy they can strip-mine before anyone notices the lights flickering.
Trump-era cultural policy, where your grant proposal is judged on historical rigor, community impact, and how vigorously it salutes.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services used to fund things like Wi‑Fi in rural Alaska, kids’ science labs, and digitizing World War I documents. Under Trump 2.0, it now “particularly welcomes” projects that align with the president’s vision for America – which, according to his own executive orders, means "uplifting" stories about the country, less talk about "how bad slavery was," and a firm stand against the terrifying menace of "anti-Christian weaponization of government." Federal grants: now with 30% more mandatory vibes.
After failing to kill the agency outright and firing its professional director, Trump installed Labor Department bro Keith E. Sonderling – a man with about as much museum experience as a food court Sbarro – who immediately put almost all 75 employees on administrative leave, fired the board, and yanked previously awarded grants until the courts told him to sit down. Now the agency is back to giving out money, but with guidelines that read less like cultural policy and more like a loyalty oath to the leader’s preferred narrative of American history.
Former directors from both parties are quietly freaking out, warning that museums and libraries are being nudged into a state-approved version of the past, backed up by the White House’s ongoing audit of Smithsonian exhibits for "tone" and "alignment with American ideals." The administration swears everything will still go through peer review, just… after you signal that your project won’t mention structural racism too loudly and will definitely make visitors leave feeling "patriotic" and not, say, informed. Congratulations to the United States: we’ve invented the federal grant version of a state media department, but for story time and museum plaques.
Live shot from cable news as the White House discovers a way to turn one criminal case into a week-long argument for giving Trump even more power.
A Maryland man has been charged with attempted murder in an alleged plot to kill a Trump cabinet official, instantly becoming the White House’s new favorite excuse for why it needs more money, more guns, and fewer constitutional limits. Federal law enforcement actually did its job and intervened before anyone was hurt, which is good news for public safety and terrible news for whatever dramatic martyrdom narrative Trump was workshopping on Truth Social.
Instead of treating this as what it is — a serious but isolated criminal case — you can already see the outlines of the coming PR blitz: every protest is dangerous extremism, every critic is a latent assassin, and every abuse of power is now a necessary precaution. The administration that shrugs at mass shootings and political violence when it’s their side doing it will now spend the week explaining that this one incident proves they need broader surveillance powers and a bigger security bubble around officials who already travel like minor royalty.
So yes, a real crime, real charges, real victims potentially spared — and also a very real opportunity for an administration addicted to fear politics to squeeze one more drop of authoritarian juice out of it. Law enforcement stopped the plot; now we get to see whether anyone stops the inevitable overreach.
The Virginia Capitol, where democracy goes to get surgically redrawn every time Trump panics about an election.
Trump has decided that once-a-decade redistricting is for losers and people who read the Constitution, so he launched a fresh redistricting push to tilt the 2026 midterms toward Republicans. Virginia Democrats, apparently tired of watching the slow-motion arson of representative government, responded by dropping their own map designed to net them four extra House seats. Democracy: now available as competing DLC map packs.
The catch? Virginia’s pesky constitution still says redistricting belongs to a bipartisan commission — you know, that little reform voters passed back when we were still pretending guardrails mattered. So Democrats are now racing to amend the constitution via a special election on April 21, which Gov. Abigail Spanberger hasn’t even formally called yet and has until Feb. 11 to approve. Until then, the commission is theoretically in charge, while other states are already happily redrawing lines mid-cycle because Trump decided the rules are more of a vibe than a framework.
So Virginia is now stuck in a civics escape room: to block Trump’s election-rigging project, they first have to sideline their own ‘independent’ redistricting system, with voter approval, on an accelerated timeline, in the middle of a presidential tantrum about losing the midterms. The supposed world’s oldest continuous democracy is now functionally a cartography arms race being refereed by Donald Trump’s ego and a bunch of state constitutions no one thought they’d need to emergency patch.
Trump studies a blank map of Iran while the Pentagon labels it 'flexible objectives.'
The Trump administration is apparently gearing up for potential war with Iran using the same strategic rigor it usually applies to fast food orders. Top officials, according to U.S. sources, have no clear guidance on what Trump actually wants from possible military action — regime change, "pressure," or just some cool B-roll for campaign ads. They’ve already conducted "Operation Midnight Hammer," a 12-day bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites, while still insisting they need Iran to agree to stop a nuclear program Trump also claims he already "obliterated." Consistency is for democracies that like planning.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is out here demanding Iran negotiate over nukes, missiles, proxies, and how it treats its own people, while Iran says it will only discuss the nuclear file. So naturally, the U.S. is simultaneously threatening more strikes, moving an aircraft carrier group into position, and insisting this is all just…"leverage." Even Gulf states and Israel — yes, Israel — are now quietly telling Trump to maybe not start World War III without a plan, especially since the White House hasn’t bothered to share objectives with its own allies. Always inspiring when everyone in the region looks at Washington and says, "this seems reckless."
Back home, the messaging is exactly as unhinged as the policy. Trump boasts on TV that Iran’s supreme leader should be "very worried" while claiming credit for ending a bloody crackdown that killed more than 6,000 protesters, then immediately pivots to demanding more concessions under threat of further military action. The White House spokesperson dismisses questions by saying the commander-in-chief "wisely" doesn’t tell his plans to the "fake news" — which is convenient, since it appears he hasn’t told them to the Pentagon either. There’s no defined end state, no agreed role for the U.S. after any strikes, and even Rubio admits no one knows who would run Iran if the regime fell. Perfect conditions, historically, for a nice, clean, totally-not-endless war.
Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, carefully monitoring national security by standing in the middle of an FBI raid on a Georgia election office like an unpaid extra in Trump’s 2020 remake.
Tulsi Gabbard, who is somehow the Director of National Intelligence in this timeline, turned up at an FBI raid on a Georgia election center because... reasons. At least three different reasons, depending on which Trump quote you pick. First he told NBC he had no idea why she was there and started mumbling about China. Then, at the National Prayer Breakfast (perfect venue for casual authoritarianism), he said she went at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s insistence to "look at votes". Meanwhile, Gabbard has informed Congress she went at Trump’s direct request under her "broad statutory authority" to help with his personal 2020 obsession tour.
So we now have the nation’s top intelligence official — who has zero domestic law enforcement role — popping into an FBI raid like a surprise wedding guest, because Trump has her running a separate, White House‑approved 2020 election investigation alongside the actual justice department probe. She’s been briefing him and his inner circle every few weeks, presumably on the latest findings from the Department of Never Let It Go. The FBI does law enforcement, DOJ does prosecutions, and Trump’s DNI does... freelance MAGA myth‑validation on county voting machines. Totally normal separation of powers, if your civics textbook was written by Viktor Orbán.
The official story now exists in a kind of quantum state: Trump says it was Bondi’s idea, Gabbard says it was Trump’s, and yesterday Trump said he didn’t know at all. What is clear is that the intelligence community is being repurposed as an extension of Trump’s personal grievance committee, and the boundary between national security work and campaign‑style witch hunt has been erased with a Sharpie. But hey, if you’re trying to turn the federal government into a permanent 2020 fan fiction project, sending your DNI to hover over FBI agents in a county election office is at least on brand.
Trump reviews a list of 50,000 civil servants and circles the ones whose only crime was reading the Constitution.
The Trump administration has decided that 4,000 political appointees just aren’t enough loyalists, so they’re reclassifying about 50,000 career civil servants into a new "Schedule Policy/Career" bucket – which is Latin for "you’re fired the second you follow the law instead of Trump". Traditionally, only political appointees could be canned on a whim; now the White House wants the power to purge huge swaths of the professional bureaucracy for the crime of not treating Truth Social posts as binding legal authority.
To really complete the autocrat starter pack, the rule also guts whistleblower protections by shifting enforcement away from the independent Office of Special Counsel and into the agencies themselves. So if you report misconduct in your department, the people you reported will helpfully decide whether you still get to have a job. The Office of Personnel Management insists that “personal or political loyalty tests” are prohibited, while simultaneously handing Trump the ability to politically purge anyone deemed insufficiently obedient. It’s like banning arson while mailing out free flamethrowers.
Unions and watchdogs are calling this what it is: a blueprint for politically motivated purges and a direct assault on a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service. AFGE warns that competent professionals will be swapped out for political flunkies, which, if history is any guide, means a lot more Jareds and Kash Patels and a lot fewer people who know how federal law works. Heritage’s Project 2025 has been drooling over this exact plan for years; now OPM director Scott Kupor is dutifully selling it as “much-needed accountability,” because nothing screams accountability like making every policy job dependent on personal loyalty to one extremely indicted man.
Bernie Sanders, patiently explaining that when the president is arresting opponents, terrorizing communities with a domestic shock troop, and fantasizing about annexing random countries, maybe the real problem isn’t too much civility in politics.
Bernie Sanders has taken a brief break from being the country’s disappointed grandfather to lay out the obvious: the American Dream has been repossessed, the middle class is on life support, and the billionaire class is joyriding around in what’s left of the republic. Wages are flat, housing is a luxury product, college is a debt trap, healthcare is a slot machine, and our food and transit systems are held together with corn syrup and wishful thinking.
But the economic collapse is just the appetizer. The main course is Trump’s ongoing authoritarian cosplay, which has now blown past "strongman aesthetic" and landed firmly in actual strongman behavior. Sanders spells it out: Trump is usurping Congress, menacing the courts, bullying the media and universities, and using the justice system as a personal vengeance machine. ICE, meanwhile, is described as Trump’s "domestic army" – terrorizing communities, kicking down doors without due process, detaining children, illegally deporting people, and, yes, shooting American citizens, because nothing says "law and order" like state-sanctioned chaos.
Abroad, President Big Brain feels more at home with Gulf monarchies and far-right extremists than with boring old democracies. Sanders points to Trump’s unconditional embrace of Netanyahu (currently starring in "Genocide, But Make It Policy"), illegal attacks on Venezuela, and fever-dream ideas like annexing Canada or seizing Greenland, as if Risk is now official U.S. foreign policy. The op-ed then commits the gravest sin in Washington: it suggests actually confronting oligarchs, ending Citizens United, taxing the rich, guaranteeing healthcare, building housing, and letting workers unionize – you know, the sort of agenda that might interfere with the donor class’s urgent need for a ninth yacht.
Sanders’ message is that you don’t beat creeping fascism just by tweeting "this is not normal" into the void. You organize, build a multiracial working-class movement, and pass policies that actually improve people’s lives – which, inconveniently, would make Trump-style strongman theatrics less appealing. The ruling class calls that "radical"; history calls it "the bare minimum for not sliding into oligarchic ruin."
Live look at American democracy, brought to you by the guy who thinks elections are only legitimate when he wins them.
On today’s episode of “What If We Just Deleted Federalism”, Trump is reportedly pushing to “nationalize” U.S. elections — because if there’s one guy you want in charge of every ballot, it’s the man who tried to overturn the last one and then demanded to be made president again by default. Even congressional Republicans, whose job description is usually “nod along and pretend this is fine,” are backing away from this one like it’s a subpoena.
Meanwhile, over at DHS, the administration is apparently assembling what House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark bluntly calls a “rogue paramilitary force.” So that’s cool: centralized control of elections on one side, an unaccountable, politicized security apparatus on the other. Somewhere James Madison just sat bolt upright in his grave and started looking for the nearest exit.
If that’s not enough authoritarian cosplay for one news block, Democrats are also begging for “common sense” rules to make sure ICE agents “behave” — which is a polite way of saying “maybe the federal government shouldn’t run its immigration enforcement like a spite-fueled militia.” The throughline of the whole hour: Trump wants more direct control over the mechanics of democracy, fewer checks on the people with guns, and Republicans are only objecting because it might blow back on them in the midterms, not because any of this resembles a healthy republic.
So to recap: a president who tried to overturn an election now wants to run all elections, his DHS toys are being described as a rogue paramilitary, and the best Congress can muster is a mix of nervous press hits and sternly worded letters. The Founders definitely imagined this when they wrote “checks and balances,” they just forgot to add the part where one branch is too scared of mean tweets to use them.
Tom Homan explains that flooding Minnesota with 2,000 federal agents is actually de-escalation if you squint hard enough and ignore the bodies.
Tom Homan, the guy who helped design family separation and once promised to run "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen," has been flown into Minnesota as Trump's "border czar" to calm tensions after two US citizens were killed during immigration raids. His big peace offering? Pulling back 700 agents while proudly noting that 2,000 federal immigration officers are still flooding the state, compared with the usual 150. Nothing says "de-escalation" like leaving a small occupying army in place and refusing to say the victims' names.
Gregory Bovino, the previous crisis arsonist in charge, made a name for himself with parking-lot ambushes, home raids and echoing Kristi Noem's baseless claim that Alex Pretti was armed. Now he's been replaced by Homan, who is slightly better at talking to cameras but fully committed to the same program: "If you're in the country illegally, if we find you, we will deport you." Meanwhile, people with legal status and no criminal record keep getting scooped up, protesters and observers get roughed up, and DHS pretends it's all about "public safety threats."
The new strategy is classic Trump-era strongman: squeeze local jails into quietly collaborating so ICE can vacuum people up at release, then brag that "more agents in the jail means fewer agents in the street"—as if moving the civil rights violations indoors makes them gentler. Minnesota law bans holding people past release on ICE detainers, so Homan swears nobody’s being kept "one minute" extra, while refusing to say which sheriffs have cut backroom deals. Experts point out the obvious: the mission hasn't changed at all, just the PR packaging, and if Minnesota caves now, the administration can always come back later with more raids and more demands.
So Minneapolis gets a polished architect of family separation instead of a loudmouthed raid enthusiast, thousands of federal agents still roaming the state, and an administration openly using one blue state as a test lab for a national mass deportation regime. The agenda is still the same: normalize a permanent crackdown, call it law and order, and hope people stop noticing that citizens are getting killed while the "border" is now apparently in downtown Minneapolis.
Live from New York: one last performance of free expression before the Ministry of Culture turns the lights off.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in culture policy: if it looks like art, defunds like art, or might someday criticize Dear Leader, it gets the axe. Around $27m in arts grants have vanished, some 560 projects tossed into the trash, and the Kennedy Center — where Trump proudly bragged about cutting "woke programming" — is now conveniently "closed for renovations". The Smithsonian and other big institutions have been put on notice: stay safe, stay bland, and definitely don’t mention fascism unless you’re endorsing it.
Artists, being historically bad at shutting up, are responding by turning the whole country into a low-budget Weimar reboot. In LA, Unquiet: A Night of Creative Resistance features poems like Antifa Tea Party and anti-fascist improv, while the nationwide Fall of Freedom series pulled off 700+ performances, from live remediations of ICE detentions to dance protests at the very Kennedy Center Trump is trying to neuter. Playwrights are staging dystopias about ICE raids and abortion, climate dramatists are bracing for death threats because the president is busy "gutting meteorology and science", and theaters serving immigrant and Palestinian communities are building safety protocols in case ICE decides the show needs a raid.
So now just showing up to a play about climate change or state violence is a political act, and venues are quietly planning for what happens when law enforcement or federal goons decide art is terrorism. Trump gets his culture war; what he’s actually building is a shadow network of resistance theaters, poets, and performers who’ve realized that if the administration is going to treat them like enemies of the state, they might as well act like it — tickets on sale now.
