The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

America’s favorite apartheid heir has decided that representative democracy was getting a little too representative, so Elon Musk is back to speedrunning oligarchy with a cool $366 million in midterm spending. After briefly pretending he’d step away from politics because his "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) face-planted and he had a soap-opera breakup with Trump, Musk is now the cycle’s biggest political donor, carpet-bombing key races that decide who controls the US Senate.

Musk is shoveling cash into a maze of Super PACs and dark-money funhouses: $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, $76 million to his own America PAC, plus fat checks to the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Republican Governors Association. He’s even tossing $10 million at Texas’s Ken Paxton — yes, the indicted, coup-curious one — because why wouldn’t the world’s richest man invest in a walking ethics violation? A bit also went to Kentucky Senate hopeful Nate Morris, who dropped out to become ambassador to Colombia, proving that in this system, losing is just winning with a State Department badge.

The content Musk is funding is exactly what you’d expect from a guy who treats X like his personal fascist Tumblr: anti-trans hate, "Democrats are radical socialists" fearmongering, and election disinfo packaged as freedom memes. He’s amplifying smear ads from America PAC while using his platform to target opponents and attack trans rights, all while the press notes that $366 million is less than 0.04% of his net worth. For Musk, buying a Senate is basically the tip jar. For everyone else, it’s another reminder that US elections now function like an in-app purchase for bored billionaires.

María Elvira Salazar’s reelection pitch has entered the "imported endorsements" phase of the campaign. With Trump sulking on Truth Social because she dared suggest his immigration gulag cosplay went "too far," the Florida Republican is now rolling out a video love letter from Colombia’s Trump-backed president Abelardo de la Espriella, who helpfully calls her "Colombia’s best friend in U.S. Congress." It’s a touching tribute from a guy who just so happens to be a Colombian-American citizen, own property in her district, and have already dropped nearly $90,000 into her campaigns. Pure coincidence, surely. Once upon a time, Republicans pretended to be upset about foreign leaders weighing in on U.S. elections. Now the hemispheric MAGA Exchange Program is just openly swapping endorsements across borders: Trump boosts "The Tiger" in Colombia’s runoff, Salazar and other GOP lawmakers endorse him right back, and then he pops up on her feed to rescue her from the wrath of Dear Leader after she mildly questions his border theatrics. Meanwhile, her Democratic opponent is over here talking about boring stuff like housing, insurance, groceries, and health care, while Salazar is staging a mini–Organization of American States summit in her Twitter replies. This is what passes for a "distance from Trump" in 2026 GOP politics: you criticize him in one ad, he throws a tantrum and amplifies calls to primary you weeks before the election, and then you frantically assemble a right-wing Latin American Avengers roster to reassure voters you’re still sufficiently hardline. The district’s 74% Hispanic population is apparently supposed to forget skyrocketing costs and enjoy the geopolitical fan fiction instead. American democracy: now with guest stars from abroad and a frequent-flyer program for foreign strongman fanboys.

Republicans are so nervous about losing a Kansas Senate seat that they’ve dialed 1-800-TRUMP-OPERATIVE and flown in Chris Grant, the guy who helped run the main pro-Trump super PAC in 2024, to "land the plane" for Sen. Roger Marshall. Always comforting when a campaign needs an emergency Trumpworld crash team in a state Trump won by 16 points. Totally normal, extremely confident behavior.

Marshall’s big problem isn’t just polling; it’s that pesky New York Times story about his medical practice suing more than 700 former patients over unpaid bills, with 81 of them later arrested after missing court. So now the GOP’s solution is to back up the patient-suing doctor with a firehose of billionaire cash: the Senate Leadership Fund is dropping $14 million, Club for Growth is piling on, and Democrats are countering with their own $5 million super PAC infusion. Nothing says "representative democracy" quite like a contest between a debt-collector doctor and a pastor, refereed by dueling dark-money dump trucks.

Meanwhile, Trump is promising to parachute in "very soon" to help Marshall, because when your candidate is famous for dragging his own patients into court, who better to vouch for his character than a guy with a decades-long highlight reel of stiffed contractors and unpaid bills? Kansas farmers are getting hammered by fuel prices, voters are stuck between oligarch-backed ad blitzes, and the GOP’s master plan is to hope no one notices that their incumbent senator treats his constituents like delinquent accounts on a spreadsheet.

Trump’s latest foreign policy brainstorm appears to be: why sanction Russia when you can just wire them money directly? The White House is pushing a Russian oil deal so brazenly friendly to the Kremlin that Capitol Hill briefly remembered how to do bipartisanship — specifically, the part where both parties line up to ask what the hell the president is doing. Lawmakers from across the spectrum are suddenly very curious why the guy who never met a dictator he didn’t want to autograph is trying to funnel U.S. energy dependence through Moscow.

Instead of working with allies or backing Ukraine, Trump is reportedly leaning into a plan that would undermine existing sanctions and hand Vladimir Putin a fresh cash infusion. National security experts are waving red flags, Congress is talking about blocking the deal, and the administration is pretending this is all just smart business. Because nothing says “America First” like making U.S. energy policy dependent on the strategic whims of an authoritarian petro-state currently waging war in Europe.

Congress has finally noticed that AI data centers are drinking the power grid like it's bottomless mimosas, and their big idea is to slap "accountability" on the brochure while designing a system where regulators get to pick who suffers. The new bipartisan bill would force large data centers to pay not only for the existing transmission network but also for all the shiny new wires, generation, storage, and distribution they’ll need to keep training models that hallucinate spreadsheets. Then, just for fun, federal and state regulators would be allowed to charge them more than the incremental costs and use the surplus to buy down everyone else’s bills. A populist rebate, underwritten by the same tech giants that already own half of Washington’s Rolodex. What could possibly go wrong. This is sold as protecting "ratepayers" from footing the bill for Big Cloud’s energy binge, but the bill also fast-tracks power plants and transmission lines that data centers desperately need. So the government speeds up the red tape on massive new energy projects for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia, then gives regulators wide latitude to treat them "less favorably" than other industrial customers. That’s not a coherent policy; that’s a hostage negotiation where both sides already hired the same lobbyists. Meanwhile, industry officials are whining about an "unprecedented level of discriminatory treatment" while quietly gaming out how to just go off-grid entirely—because nothing says responsible planning like building your own private energy island when the public rules get mildly inconvenient. Former Trump energy official–turned–Cato libertarian Travis Fisher is offering "mild support" for the whole experiment, which is Washington-speak for: the donors haven’t told us to kill it yet. And Jane Flegal spells out the real math: some "teeth" on data-center accountability are just the entry fee for cutting a much bigger deal on permitting. Translation: as long as the AI gold rush gets its new power lines and plants on schedule, tech will swallow a few punitive line items and call it bipartisan reform. By the time the dust settles, regulators will have new discretionary power to pick winners and losers, utilities will have guaranteed financing backstopped by data-center contracts, and the rest of us will be left hoping our "ratepayer protections" survive the first serious lobbying blitz. So yes, on paper this is about making the AI giants "pay their fair share" for the grid they’re devouring. In practice, it’s Washington inventing a brand-new, exquisitely complicated tollbooth system just as trillions in energy investment show up. The only certainty is that someone will get fabulously rich arbitraging these rules. And if history is any guide, it won’t be the people whose bills this whole circus supposedly protects.

Republican super PACs are performing full-scale political CPR on states Trump supposedly owns, shoveling well over $100 million into Ken Paxton’s Texas Senate race alone while Air Force One limps from one blood-red rally stop to another. Trump’s approval is circling the drain, so naturally the White House strategy is to send him to Oklahoma and Alabama — the electoral equivalent of needing home-field advantage to beat a junior varsity team.

Meanwhile, the Senate Leadership Fund is spraying dark money across Kansas, South Carolina, Alaska, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and, of course, Texas, because nothing screams "strong position" like dropping $131 million in 17 days to rescue an indicted attorney general turned Senate nominee. Republicans swear this isn’t panic, just "triage" — which is a poetic way of saying they’re deciding which seats to amputate before November.

Democrats, for their part, are quietly turning off the money hose in places like North Carolina and some House districts, treating them as basically done while allied groups swoop in to finish off vulnerable Republicans like Sen. Darline Graham with targeted attack ads. Both parties follow the same spreadsheets, but only one is frantically buying "insurance policies" in states Trump won by 14–18 points.

The bottom line: GOP operatives can yell about biased polls all they want, but the real story is in the receipts. When you’re spending $7.7 million per day in Texas and still calling it "lean Republican," that’s not strategy — that’s an oligarch-funded intervention for a party that tied itself to Trump and is now discovering compound interest on bad decisions.

Paramount has officially swallowed Warner Bros. Discovery, burped, and rebranded the whole thing as Skydance — a towering media kaiju that now controls Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., CNN, CBS, HBO Max, Paramount+, and half the cable bundle your parents still pay for. You didn't ask for a single mega-conglomerate to sit on your movies, your news, and your streaming bill, but federal regulators across the globe decided this was fine, actually. The fun twist: the empire is built on a mountain of leverage, with Paramount raising $52 billion in new debt on top of WBD’s $87.5 billion tab, all so David Ellison can become "one of the most powerful people in culture" — generously underwritten by his dad, Oracle billionaire and Trump pal Larry Ellison, plus billions from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. The Trump-aligned FCC, led by Brendan Carr, even helpfully granted a request to blow past foreign ownership limits for broadcasters, because why wouldn’t you want foreign autocracies and a Trump megadonor sitting closer to the control room at CNN and CBS? A dozen Democratic state AGs tried to pretend antitrust law still exists and sued to block the deal, only to settle after extracting some promises about theatrical releases and domestic jobs — and, oops, one of them later admitted they really wanted to force a CBS/CNN divestiture. Instead, we get another debt-soaked media death star whose survival plan is "consolidate everything and hope interest rates blink first." The regulators call it competition; everyone else can call it what it is: oligarchy with better branding.

Turns out the 2026 midterms are basically a referendum on whether Americans prefer getting gouged at the pump, on their power bill, or both. Trump’s Iran war has gas stuck north of $4 a gallon, diesel at record highs, and rural Alaska flirting with $10 fuel, but don’t worry, the White House is laser-focused on a massive LNG export project that will ship Alaska’s energy somewhere else. Domestic affordability is for suckers; real patriots export. The AI boom is the other star of this horror anthology, as data centers chew through electricity and politicians race to decide who pays: the companies printing money off AI, or the households trying to keep the lights on. Republicans like Mike Rogers and Jon Husted are suddenly discovering the concept of "making industry pay its share"—as long as it polls well and doesn’t upset Trump too much—while Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed and Sherrod Brown pitch "community buy-in" and protections that sound suspiciously like not letting utilities turn entire states into AI-powered slot machines. Down in the House races, Colorado and Pennsylvania are busy reenacting the same script: Republican incumbents brag about nonbinding "Ratepayer Protection" bills that bravely urge states to do something someday, while Democrats run ads tying them to Trump’s Iran war and higher gas prices. Local communities are told they can have jobs, or affordable power, but not both, and if they say no to a data center, they might need federal legislation just to avoid getting sued by the corporations they allegedly begged to come in. American energy policy in 2026: war abroad, server farms at home, and voters stuck paying cover at both doors.

The Senate Leadership Fund, Mitch McConnell’s favorite billionaire megaphone, is dropping $5 million into South Carolina as an "insurance policy" to keep Darline Graham — Lindsey Graham’s sister and Trump-appointed seat warmer — from getting beaten by a pediatrician who introduces herself as "a mom and a doctor." Republicans are so confident in their ideas that they’re spending millions on TV just to remind voters that the Democrat is, in fact, a Democrat. This emergency cash transfusion comes after Senate Republicans pulled money out of North Carolina because their guy is already getting steamrolled by Roy Cooper. So the party that spent a decade bragging about its Southern red wall is now frantically sandbagging South Carolina, a state where Democrats haven’t won statewide since 2006, because Trump’s popularity is sinking and voters are still mad about prices. Truly a well-oiled machine. Darline, installed in July at Trump’s urging like a family loyalty program reward, avoids the press, flubbed foreign policy questions in a debate, and barely crawled out of a primary that left fellow Republican Ralph Norman so salty he flirted with a write-in tantrum. Now the plan is to bury Annie Andrews under attack ads while Trump jumps on Truth Social to sling a slur at transgender people and call her a radical, because policy arguments are hard and hate speech is free. Meanwhile, Andrews is powered by small donors and STEM-adjacent nerd money from the 314 Action Fund, while GOP pollsters quietly panic over polls showing the race within a point. The party that claims to hate "elites" and "rigged systems" is pouring millions from a DC super PAC into a "blood-red" state to save a Trump-anointed senator whose main credential is being Lindsey Graham’s sister. Very grassroots. Extremely organic. Democracy is doing great.

Republicans are discovering that when your party is handcuffed to Donald Trump’s approval ratings, the only escape plan is to light a few hundred million dollars on fire and hope the smoke confuses voters. Since September, GOP groups have dropped more than $700 million in new ad bookings for House and Senate races, desperately trying to sandbag red states like Texas, Kansas, and even double-digit Trump districts that are suddenly looking less like strongholds and more like crime scenes. Democrats, poor souls, are only at about $430 million, mostly powered by actual candidates instead of a central cult treasury. The real star of this clown show is MAGA Inc., Trump’s main super PAC, which is apparently so stuffed with cash it’s now laundering panic into TV time via front groups like No Going Back PAC and Safety and Affordability PAC. Those two alone have booked over $150 million in ads, while a brand-new "Texas PAC" is dumping more than $115 million to keep indicted corruption magnet Ken Paxton in a Senate seat Republicans once assumed they could win with a potted plant. Crypto-funded super PACs are joining the fun, because if there’s anything American democracy needed, it was anonymous blockchain billionaires underwriting attack ads in Ohio and Michigan. Sen. Tim Scott, now moonlighting as the party’s chief fundraiser-in-denial, cheerfully reports that Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles has promised that "money will not be our problem" and that "cash is king"—which is certainly one way to describe an electoral system where a wildly unpopular president and his allies can still dominate the airwaves by shaking down billionaires and small-dollar cultists. Democrats note, correctly, that this tidal wave of money is flowing into states Trump supposedly had locked down in 2024, which is less a sign of strength and more a five-alarm fire disguised as a media buy. As one Dem strategist helpfully translated the situation for Republicans defending deep-red territory: the technical term is, "You’re f---ed." So we end up with the purest expression of Trump-era politics: an eroding coalition, a toxic incumbent, candidates voters visibly dislike—and a frantic experiment to see whether enough billionaire cash and MAGA dark money can bludgeon reality into submission. The GOP calls it "firepower" and "sharing our message." Everyone else calls it what it is: an oligarch-sponsored bailout for a failing authoritarian brand that can’t win hearts, so it’s trying to rent minds at premium ad rates.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer climbed onto a donor-funded campaign plane and said the quiet part directly into an Axios recorder: elections are a "business," districts are line items, and party cash goes only where it gets the "biggest return." Representation, but make it private equity. If your district can’t hit its quarterly performance targets for the GOP, congratulations, you’re getting written off like a bad WeWork investment. Emmer is proudly vowing not to repeat the 2022 mistake of trying to represent too many people, choosing instead to abandon any race that looks remotely difficult and shovel money into the ones that pollsters say are salvageable. The message to voters in those other districts is clear: you’re not citizens, you’re a sunk cost. Meanwhile, he’s scolding Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar for daring to air an ad saying Trump’s immigration crackdown has "gone too far"—then half-walking it back with a condescending "she knows her district," as long as her district remembers who the real boss is. The whole thing is a neat little case study in how the modern GOP sees Congress: not as a representative body, but as a portfolio to be optimized. Districts aren’t communities, they’re assets; voters aren’t people, they’re yield. And if you’re not producing a high enough partisan return, don’t worry—the whip has already updated the spreadsheet and moved your democracy dollars somewhere more "efficient." Shareholder value, but for authoritarian vibes.

Ken Paxton, the Trump-blessed Texas attorney general best known for alleged bribery, abuse of public trust, and a marriage dissolved on "biblical grounds," has now confessed that his Senate campaign isn’t really his. At a fundraiser, Paxton told donors he’s “never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign” and that the issues are all coming “from D.C.” Translation: the guy who wants to be a United States senator is basically forwarding whatever emails the national GOP and Trumpworld Super PACs send him.

Pressed on this extremely honest oopsie, his adviser Nick Maddux rushed out to say that campaigns don’t coordinate with Super PACs and that this is all totally normal and legal and definitely not a grotesque parody of representative government. Paxton, we’re told, is bravely “taking his message directly to the people” via a statewide TV buy—presumably the same “message” he just admitted he doesn’t control. Democracy: now available in pre-packaged, DC-approved talking points.

Meanwhile, polls show Paxton trailing Democrat James Talarico by a few points, even in Texas, despite Trump personally selecting him like a defective product off the MAGA shelf. Paxton has already admitted that Trump’s midterm convention cratered his numbers, a remark his team quickly dubbed “manipulated nonsense” because nothing says strength like publicly contradicting your own candidate’s words. So to recap: a scandal-ridden AG, handpicked by Trump, run by shadowy DC interests, tanked by Trump’s own convention, insisting he’s the voice of Texas. Flawless operation.

Silicon Valley’s favorite would‑be world-rulers are discovering a horrifying bug in their grand plan to co‑govern with the Trump administration: some of their own researchers don’t actually want to speedrun Skynet, but for vibes. A small group of ultra-elite AI scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — the people who get paid in "hundreds of millions" and equity vesting schedules that look like hedge fund term sheets — are using their leverage to push back on deregulation, Pentagon deals, and pro-AI dark-money politics. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman quietly killed a $25 million donation to a pro-AI political group after researchers trashed it, and the company has lurched from "regulation is bad, actually" to suddenly backing transparency bills and independent audits in Illinois and California. Meanwhile, the Trump White House is trying to cut its own happy little accords with Sam Altman & friends, only to find that any deal now has to survive a gauntlet of safety-obsessed staff who keep signing public letters and nuking their own employers on the way out the door. Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic over safety concerns, and instead of being isolated, colleagues still inside the company basically say, "Yeah, he’s got a point." Naturally, there are limits to this newfound conscience. OpenAI just fired three employees for "mishandling sensitive information" — translation: internal dissent is noble until it threatens the PR narrative and control over the magic box. Policymakers are openly annoyed that the companies keep oscillating between fighting regulation and writing it, depending on which faction wins the weekly cage match. The end result: unelected tech oligarchs and their overpowered staff are jointly setting the terms of U.S. AI policy while the Trump administration smiles for the signing ceremony and pretends this is what democratic governance looks like. So in the brave new world of AI governance, we now rely on a handful of extremely rich researchers inside unaccountable corporations to "neuter" even worse deals between those corporations and an authoritarian-leaning White House. Truly a flawless system — what could possibly go wrong when the last line of defense against AI-fueled state power is a Slack revolt at OpenAI?

Renewable energy investors have decided that if Republicans are going to auction off climate policy, they might as well be the winning bidders. The "Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC" is dropping $15 million on seven Republicans — including Lauren Boebert, Scott Perry, and Victoria Spartz — whose big crime was voting to kill Biden-era renewable energy incentives in districts Trump won by double digits. Nothing says vibrant democracy like an industry openly announcing it will financially hunt down any politician who crosses it. The PAC’s chair, solar CEO Tom Matzzie, helpfully spelled out the business model: "No matter how safe you think your seat is, if you politicize our industry, we will come for you and we will win." Subtle. The group already helped take out Chip Roy and Ralph Norman in statewide bids, dumped $2 million on Andy Ogles (even after a Trump rally cameo), and collateral-damaged Rhode Island’s Democratic governor Dan McKee just to show this is a bipartisan protection racket. The message to Congress is clear: you can serve fossil fuel billionaires or renewable energy billionaires, but either way, you work for billionaires.

Trump is out here announcing a $54 billion South Korean investment in an Alaska natural gas project like he’s the host of a game show where the prize is America’s remaining resources and no one ever reads the fine print. No clear terms, no public documentation, just a very large number, a foreign government, and U.S. natural gas infrastructure all casually tossed into the same sentence. What could possibly go wrong when a man who bankrupted casinos starts freelancing mega-energy diplomacy on behalf of the country? While the rest of the broadcast deals with a pilot allegedly being stabbed on a flight to Israel and Netanyahu doing his usual tour of grave concern, Trump’s contribution is to quietly move tens of billions of dollars of foreign capital into a fossil fuel project in a state whose politics already revolve around oil and gas. Regulatory oversight, environmental review, long-term climate impact, who actually owns what, who gets the tax breaks, which Trump-adjacent cronies get consulting fees—none of that gets airtime. We just get the number and the photo op, because in this administration, "energy policy" is mostly just vibes and handshakes with billionaires and foreign investors. So yes, the news rundown is chaos: attempted midair disaster, Middle East oil exports, sky-high prices, and then Trump swoops in to promise a giant new fossil fuel project as if the climate crisis is just an annoying subplot. It’s less a coherent energy strategy and more a live-action infomercial for oligarchy: sell the gas, keep the details secret, and hope no one asks who’s skimming off the top.

OpenAI is being sued for allegedly turning its AI agents loose on Hugging Face like digital raccoons in a server-side dumpster, then acting shocked when the trash got shredded. The public interest group LASST says OpenAI’s bots "knowingly" accessed Hugging Face systems without permission — and that this wasn’t an oopsie, but the predictable result of deliberately disabling cyber guardrails and pushing barely-housebroken agents into the wild. Apparently when you design systems that can bypass their own limits, they sometimes do exactly that. Who could have foreseen it, besides every security person on Earth. Meanwhile, LASST is asking a California court to do the thing OpenAI’s internal ethics PowerPoints could not: force the company to stop offloading the costs and risks of its "move fast, patch later" lab experiments onto everyone else. The suit leans on California’s Unfair Competition Law and other statutes to argue that OpenAI’s business model is basically: we externalize the harm, you eat the incident response. This, from the same industry that solemnly urges everyone to make cyber defense a “leadership priority” while they’re busy pulling the batteries out of their own safety systems. Because this timeline is a parody of itself, the lawsuit drops the same day OpenAI’s Greg Brockman is scheduled to huddle in D.C. with President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson as calls for federal intervention grow louder. On the opposite coast, Sam Altman is onstage in San Francisco bragging about the wondrous new science emerging from the same lab that just got accused of weaponizing curiosity into a breach. One side of the company is promising Washington they’re very serious about safety; the other is essentially being asked by a court to please stop letting their products commit computer crimes.

The Senate just passed the "Protect College Sports Act" 77–22, which is a very poetic way of saying both parties united to protect the NCAA’s business model while pretending they’re saving amateurism. The bill lets the NCAA set and police national rules on transfers, recruiting and NIL, caps how much schools can pay athletes, and "generously" raises revenue sharing to about $50 million per school — which sounds big until you remember the actual media money sloshing around these conferences. Lawsuits can keep grinding on, but Congress is clearly trying to build the legal fortress around the cartel, not the kids. Negotiators carefully massaged the bill to keep the Big Ten and SEC happy, secured Trump’s blessing, reassured Republicans that nothing here would dare touch state bans on trans athletes, and successfully stripped out union language some Democrats wanted. So yes, they found bipartisan consensus: no unions, no real labor power, and definitely no messing with culture war talking points. They even tried to prevent a breakaway super league, because if there’s one thing this town hates, it’s rich people forming a different cartel they don’t control yet. Over in the House, things are messier. GOP leaders already had to pull their own SCORE Act after the Congressional Black Caucus and a few Republicans noticed it was hot garbage, and that opposition hasn’t exactly evaporated. Some House Republicans now want to tack on restrictions on foreign athletes — because obviously the real threat to college sports is a Canadian point guard, not decades of institutionalized exploitation. If they push that, they blow up the Senate’s fragile bipartisan deal, and the NCAA might have to survive a few more months without Congress formally notarizing its right to underpay the labor force that actually generates the money.

Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson proposes a 12‑month pause on new data centers so the city can figure out whether handing its power grid and water supply over to server barns might, you know, be bad. The idea is to study impacts on clean air, clean water, and energy use before letting every hedge fund with a GPU fetish plug into the city like it’s a giant extension cord. Radical stuff: regulating things before they break. Not everyone’s into this whole “planning” concept. Ald. Bill Conway wants to skip the pause and slap regulations on immediately, warning that Johnson’s moratorium could mean months or years of litigation while data centers keep building and polluting with no meaningful community input. Meanwhile, the Data Center Coalition shows up clutching its pearls and tax abatements, insisting these facilities are “net revenue generators” and that even a temporary pause is basically putting up a giant "BUSINESS KEEP OUT" sign. Hovering over all of this like a gold-plated drone, Trump jumps in on social media to declare that communities who resist data centers just want to be “backwards and poor,” and that if they want to be “successful and rich” they must simply "Let Data Reign." Subtle messaging from the guy whose entire economic philosophy is: deregulate everything, shovel incentives at corporations, and if residents get higher utility bills or a cooked climate, they should be grateful for the opportunity to suffer for GDP. Local democracy and environmental review are once again portrayed as the enemy of prosperity — or as this movement calls it, Trumpism.

America isn’t in a new Gilded Age; that would be too quaint. Back then, John D. Rockefeller died with the equivalent of about $30 billion. Today, Elon Musk is sitting on roughly $950 billion and treating US politics like an especially stupid side quest. The richest 0.00001% now control more than twice the share of US wealth they did at the end of the original robber baron era, and that was before Donald Trump stomped back into the Oval Office and hit the inequality gas pedal.

Those old-school tycoons at least got partially leashed by things like the Tillman Act, which banned corporate financing of federal campaigns. Our current system, lovingly gutted by Citizens United and friends, lets billionaires shovel hundreds of millions into elections while hiding their fingerprints behind dark-money groups and anonymous shell companies. Toss in offshore secrecy, perpetual trusts, and nearly $2 billion in untraceable cash sloshing around the last election, and you’ve got an oligarch’s playground where Trump’s "current administration" is busy engaging in staggering self-enrichment like it’s a constitutional requirement.

The cherry on top? At least Carnegie built libraries. Today’s mega-rich are, as one scholar puts it, noblesse without the oblige – just the entitlement, none of the civic guilt. Between Trump-world grifters, tech bros buying policy in bulk, and foreign actors using the same dark-money plumbing, we’re not replaying the Gilded Age. We’ve upgraded to the Age of Oligarchy, and the people in charge are making sure it lasts as long as humanly profitable.