The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration has discovered an exciting new way to handle the massive immigration court backlog: eliminate the court. San Francisco’s immigration court, one of the busiest in the country, is being shuttered by the end of the year. Judges and staff got the news the modern way — a short email — informing them they’ll be shipped 30 miles away to Concord, because nothing says access to justice like forcing immigrants and their lawyers to commute even farther to a court that’s already drowning in cases.

This comes after Trump’s DOJ spent 2025 firing immigration judges like they were hosting a reality show reboot. San Francisco went from 21 judges to just four and a single supervisor, even as they were left holding roughly 120,935 cases. Nationwide, nearly 100 judges were axed, including at least 19 veterans who actually knew what they were doing. The official line from EOIR is that moving everything to Concord is "more cost-effective" — in other words, we broke the system on purpose, and now we’re saving money by not fixing it.

The Concord court, which was originally opened to help relieve San Francisco’s overload, has itself been bleeding judges and staff and already has a growing backlog. So naturally, the solution is to dump San Francisco’s six-figure caseload on top of it or run hearings remotely, because what could possibly go wrong with life-or-death asylum decisions handled over glitchy video from a gutted judiciary. This isn’t about efficiency; it’s about constricting due process until people just give up and get deported. But sure, tell us again how this is all about the "rule of law."

Donald Trump has now gone on the record with the New York Times to say the quiet part even louder: he regrets not using the National Guard to seize voting machines after losing the 2020 election. In other words, the former (and now current) president is sad his coup didn’t involve more troops and fewer laws. He still insists he actually won 2020—"I won three times," he boasts—because nothing says "strong democracy" like a guy who keeps adding imaginary wins to his record like they’re Trump University diplomas.

The idea to grab voting machines wasn’t some fever dream from a Telegram channel; it was floated in a December 2020 Oval Office meeting with Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, the brain trust of "what if martial law, but make it kooky." They even drafted executive orders to have the Defense Department "seize, collect, retain and analyze" voting machines in swing states, which is a fun way of saying "use the military to overturn an election." Even Bill Barr—yes, that Bill Barr—reportedly "immediately shot down" the plan, because when Bill "Cover-Up" Barr is your voice of restraint, you are way, way off the constitutional map.

Trump now muses that the National Guard might not be "sophisticated enough" to pull off his fantasy machine grab, praising them as "good warriors" but questioning their ability to navigate the alleged dark arts of "crooked Democrats." Translation: he wanted soldiers to help him stay in power, but worries the troops might not be as committed to overthrowing American democracy as Sidney Powell’s group chat. Meanwhile, actual election security experts still say 2020 was the most secure election in US history, and Trump’s lawsuits crashed and burned in courts nationwide—but sure, the real problem is that the tanks never made it to the county clerk’s office.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has quietly upgraded Trump’s wall space from "twice-impeached coup-curious president" to "vibes-only" by swapping out his photo and deleting any mention of his two impeachments and the Jan. 6 insurrection. The new portrait, courtesy of the White House photographer, comes with a new caption style that, very conveniently, no longer includes the awkward little bits about trying to overturn an election. Because nothing says "America’s Presidents" like pretending history is a choose-your-own-adventure novel.

The museum insists this is just part of "exploring quotes or tombstone labels" and a routine refresh, while declining to say whether the caption change was requested by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the old label — which dared to mention the impeachments, the attack on the Capitol, and other actual facts — has been exiled to the internet like some subversive samizdat. But don’t worry, the Smithsonian promises the concept of presidential impeachments still exists somewhere else in the building, presumably in a broom closet behind a "woke content" warning.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle celebrated that, "for the first time in history," the Portrait Gallery is hanging an "iconic" Trump photo whose "unmatched aura will be seen and felt" throughout the halls — which is one way to describe state-curated personality cult energy. This all dovetails perfectly with Trump’s executive order demanding the removal of "improper ideology" from Smithsonian exhibits ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. In other words: welcome to the taxpayer-funded rebrand of January 6 from "insurrection" to "incident we do not discuss" — a federally sponsored history scrub brought to you by the guy who keeps insisting he’s the real victim here.

Donald Trump has decided that antitrust law is just another content moderation tool, loudly insisting that CNN "should be sold" as a condition for any Warner Bros Discovery deal. In a stunning coincidence that is definitely not state pressure, one giant media company (Netflix) is trying to swallow Warner Bros Discovery for $82.7bn, while another (Paramount Skydance, run by David Ellison, son of Trump buddy Larry) is lunging in with a hostile $108bn bid and promising "sweeping changes" at CNN—aka giving Trump exactly what he wants. Because nothing says free press like the president personally shopping your news network to the highest sycophant.

Paramount has already run the playbook: it paid Trump $16m to settle a meritless lawsuit over a CBS interview, then installed Kenneth R Weinstein—Trump’s almost-ambassador to Japan—as a CBS "bias" monitor to soothe regulators. An FCC commissioner called this "never-before-seen" government control of newsroom decisions that violates the First Amendment, which is lawyer-speak for "this is straight-up authoritarian garbage". In the fallout, the 60 Minutes producer quit, the CBS News president quit, and Stephen Colbert’s show was cancelled just in time to smooth the path for a merger. In other words: corporate America has discovered that the easiest way to get your deal approved is to pre-cancel the jokes about the president.

Netflix, meanwhile, wants to pretend it’s the "benign" option while having its own track record of folding to political pressure—like yanking a Saudi-critical satire episode and shrugging that it’s "not in the truth-to-power business". Translation: we’ll do whatever the biggest market wants, up to and including memory-holing documentaries and political content that might upset a regime or a regulator. Handing that platform even more control over which stories exist, while Discovery’s news assets are spun into a separate corporate orphan, is how you get quiet, algorithmic censorship: fewer buyers, fewer distributors, and more executives deciding that anything "too political" just isn’t worth the regulatory headache.

The result of either deal is the same: more concentrated media power, fewer independent voices, and a president who has learned he can turn merger review into a protection racket for his ego. Give the Ellison family both CBS News and CNN, or let Netflix’s walled garden swallow another legacy studio, and you don’t just get fewer movies and higher prices—you get a media landscape where challenging journalism and dissenting stories are preemptively killed in the boardroom so they never have to be censored in public. But sure, tell us again how this is all about "consumer choice" and "efficiency" and not about killing democracy with mergers and vibes.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that the best way to handle immigration court backlogs is to just delete the courts. NPR reports that an immigration court in San Francisco is the latest to shut down after the administration fired nearly 100 immigration judges in 2025, as part of an explicit plan to "remake" the system that offers immigrants due process. Because nothing says "respect for the rule of law" like eliminating the people who apply the law.

Instead of hiring more judges or giving the system resources, Team Trump is just kneecapping it and calling it reform. Close the courts, fire the judges, then complain that the system is "broken" and needs more executive power to fix—it's the same old playbook: manufacture a crisis, then demand authoritarian solutions. In other words, they're not streamlining justice; they're suffocating it, one shuttered courtroom at a time.

President Trump has apparently decided that his second term needs a brand, and he’s going with “threats, ICE shootings, and whatever else I can get away with before lunch.” NPR politely describes it as a “provocative playbook,” because nothing says stable constitutional democracy like federal immigration agents opening fire in Minnesota while the president escalates his public threats like he’s live-tweeting a mob movie.

The headline combo tells you everything: “ICE shooting in Minnesota; Trump threats and surprises.” In other words, state violence plus presidential menacing is now just a segment on Weekend Edition, slotted neatly between the book club and the weather. The normalization is the point: an armed deportation force, a president who governs by intimidation, and the press gamely calling it a “week in politics” instead of what it is – a slow-motion demolition of basic rule-of-law norms. But sure, let’s see what “surprises” he’s got planned for next week.