The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who treats indictments like merit badges, just got a glowing endorsement in his US Senate race — for his opponent. Dan Cogdell, the Houston attorney who spent nearly a decade defending Paxton from corruption and securities fraud accusations and helped him skate through his 2023 impeachment trial, has decided that maybe, just maybe, the guy who worships Donald Trump more than he governs Texas shouldn’t be promoted.

Cogdell insists he doesn’t think Paxton should’ve been removed from office and swears he doesn’t dislike him personally; he just thinks Texas needs things like education and healthcare, not a full-time Trump bootlicker rubber-stamping whatever the Mar-a-Lago brain trust dreams up. After nine years of hauling Paxton’s legal baggage, the man has apparently hit his limit on client loyalty cosplay and would like a senator who can talk about policy without checking Truth Social first.

Paxton’s camp, naturally, responded with the intellectual rigor we’ve come to expect, dismissing Cogdell as a “Democrat” — in a state where you don’t even register by party — while lead impeachment lawyer Tony Buzbee rushed to X to reaffirm his fealty. Meanwhile, Democrat James Talarico, who’s running on the radical idea that senators should maybe focus on their state instead of their indicted cult leader, is suddenly looking competitive in deep-red Texas. When your own corruption defense attorney decides the country’s safer with you not in the Senate, that’s not a vibe, that’s a warning label.

John Bolton, former mustachioed warmonger-in-chief of the National Security Council, is reportedly set to plead guilty to mishandling classified documents — finally proving that in Trump’s America, the Espionage Act is less a law and more a loyalty test. The Justice Department, which somehow found the time to prosecute a high-profile Trump critic while still pretending the Mar-a-Lago Document Warehouse & Golf Club was a normal thing, nailed Bolton for one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents.

Bolton will also cough up a more than $2 million fine, which is a fascinating new pricing guide for classified mishandling, assuming you’re not named Donald Trump or happen to own the Republican Party’s base in bulk. The charges landed in October 2025, right in the middle of a magical season when Trump critics mysteriously kept catching indictments like it was flu season for dissenters. Trump, naturally, claimed he knew nothing about it while helpfully noting Bolton was a “bad guy” — the closest this administration ever gets to a probable cause affidavit.

Court records say Bolton will be back in court on 26 June to make it official, while every remaining Trump loyalist who ever waved classified folders around for a Fox News hit continues to enjoy total impunity. Rule of law is still on an extended vacation, but selective prosecution? That’s working overtime and billing double.

The Trump administration has now reached the "spin the globe and pick a country" phase of its deportation policy. A federal judge ruled that ICE and the State Department most likely broke the law when they deported a 55-year-old Colombian woman, Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata, to the Democratic Republic of Congo — a country that had explicitly said it would not take her. The judge has done the unthinkable in Trump’s immigration universe: ordered the U.S. to bring her back.

This fiasco is the byproduct of the White House leaning on agencies to find any country willing to accept migrants who can’t legally be sent home because they’d likely face persecution or torture there. So they cut side deals with governments, then tried to dump Ms. Zapata in Congo even after Congolese officials wrote ICE to say they couldn’t medically care for her diabetes, hyperlipidemia and hypothyroidism. When Congo is the one lecturing the United States on basic human decency and capacity, you know the moral floor has collapsed.

Rather than follow court rulings or basic asylum law, the administration’s strategy is essentially: "What if we just ignore everyone — judges, doctors, foreign governments — and see who we can shove on a plane?" It took a federal judge to point out that yes, that’s still illegal, even if Stephen Miller drew it on a whiteboard once. The cruelty isn’t a bug; it’s the operating system — and every now and then, an actual court hits Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

The 2nd Circuit just told Donald Trump he cannot, in fact, hand the bill for his $83 million E. Jean Carroll defamation verdict to "The United States" like it's a corporate Amex. In a split decision, the court rejected his request for a full en banc do-over, with Judge Denny Chin politely noting that literally no other defendant gets to wander in fifteen months after losing at trial and say, "Actually, make the taxpayers the defendant." Revolutionary stuff: presidents don't get a punch card for unlimited immunity every time they open their mouths.

Undeterred, Trump's legal team responded with its usual legal brief in all caps: it's "Liberal Lawfare," a "Democrat-funded travesty," and of course a "Witch Hunt"—because nothing says "strong legal argument" like accusing your rape accuser of being too unattractive to assault and then demanding the Justice Department defend you as part of your "official duties." E. Jean Carroll, who has been dragging this case through the courts since 2019, would simply like to finally get justice, while a three-judge minority on the court would like to expand presidential immunity so far that defaming alleged sexual-assault victims becomes a constitutional perk of the office.

Judge Chin helpfully reminded everyone that Trump didn't just "respond" once to Carroll's accusation; he spent years calling her a liar chasing money and politics, all while insisting she was beneath his assaulting standards—an argument so vile it somehow got turned into an immunity claim. Now the path is clear for Trump to beg the Supreme Court to rescue him, as he simultaneously appeals another Carroll case where he already got hit for $5 million. The man who ran on "I alone can fix it" is now arguing "The entire United States must pay for it." Bold platform.