The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in free speech: using the State Department to try to deport people who expose hate, lies, and extremism online. Imran Ahmed, head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate and a lawful DC resident with an American wife and infant daughter, was suddenly informed he faces removal from the US. His crime? Daring to hold social media and AI companies accountable, which so enraged Elon Musk that X tried—and failed—to sue his group, then apparently found a friendlier venue in Trump’s deportation machine.

Ahmed is one of five Europeans, including former EU commissioner Thierry Breton, slapped with visa bans for allegedly leading “organised efforts to coerce American platforms to censor…American viewpoints.” In other words: they pushed platforms to deal with hate speech, disinformation, and extremist content, so Trump’s people labeled that “censorship” and tried to throw them out of the country. A State Department official even bragged on X that if you “spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil” — because nothing says robust marketplace of ideas like the government exiling critics at the request of billionaires.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Ahmed’s detention or removal, but he spent Christmas separated from his family because, as he notes, others whose green cards were yanked in recent months have been arrested and shipped hundreds or thousands of miles away from their support networks. Meanwhile he calmly points out that this isn’t about partisan politics but about tech companies with “sociopathic greed” using their money and connections to corrupt the system so they can never be held accountable. Trump gets to cosplay as the defender of “American viewpoints,” Musk gets fewer pesky reports about rising racism and extremism on X, and anyone who documents the damage done by social media and AI learns that in Trump’s America, the algorithm doesn’t just shadowban you—it calls ICE.

Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff and newly christened "Susie Trump" (because nothing says healthy democracy like your top White House aide being absorbed into the family brand), has apparently decided that now is the perfect time to start whispering that the president has "an alcoholic’s personality" and a vindictive streak a mile wide. In a marathon 9,500-word Vanity Fair profile based on 11 on-the-record interviews, Wiles calls JD Vance a conspiracy theorist, labels Elon Musk an "odd, odd duck" while trashing his dismantling of USAID, and dishes on the rest of the regime like she’s doing exit interviews for a collapsing startup instead of an administration.

Wiles is publicly insisting she was the victim of a "hit piece" and "selective quoting", because of course the first woman White House chief of staff in this mess has to speedrun the "I enabled it, but with a raised eyebrow" defense. Meanwhile, veterans like Rick Wilson point out there is exactly "0.000 chance" that a hyper-seasoned operator did 11 taped interviews by accident. In other words, Susie is trying to negotiate a plea bargain with history: yes, she helped manage the revenge-obsessed, conspiracy-curious, USAID-dismantling White House, but she got the joke, you see, so she’s not one of the bad authoritarians.

The whole thing offers a neat little window into Trump’s court: a vengeful president, a Q-pilled vice-president, a billionaire wrecking US foreign aid for funsies, and a chief of staff who wants credit both for keeping the machine humming and for quietly recognizing that the machine is a meat grinder for democracy. But sure, she’s "not an enabler"—she just schedules the enabling, staffs the enabling, and calls reporters to make sure history understands she found the enabling a bit gauche.

Historians and political scientists have delivered some terrible news for Donald Trump and his friends in the "presidents should be kings now" caucus: mass protests work. From emancipation to civil rights to marriage equality, people taking to the streets has repeatedly forced the US government to stop being quite so openly terrible. In Trump’s America, that started with the 2017 Women’s March – the largest single-day protest in US history – which did more than generate pink-hat selfies. It helped trigger an explosion of women running for office and a measurable shift in votes toward Democrats in the 2018 midterms. In other words, a bunch of women showed up with signs and proceeded to rearrange Congress, which is presumably not what the Access Hollywood Administration had in mind.

The research is annoyingly clear: when lots of people protest, elections move. Counties with bigger Women’s March turnouts saw higher support for Democrats and more votes for women and candidates of color; Tea Party protests did the same for Republicans in 2010, proving that public rage is a bipartisan force multiplier. One study even notes that adding one more protester does more for a cause than adding one more voter – because nothing says "functional democracy" like having to stand in the cold with a cardboard sign just to get basic rights. And looming over Trump’s second-term fantasy of hereditary rule is the famous 3.5% rule: if roughly 3.5% of the population mobilizes against a regime, it tends to fall. With the new "No Kings" protests drawing historic crowds, the message is clear: you can pack the courts, gut the agencies, and flirt with autocracy all you want – but if a few million people decide they’re done with your cosplay monarchy, the streets start doing what the institutions won’t.