The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

South Carolina has apparently decided that the U.S. Senate is less a representative body and more a family heirloom. Days after Lindsey Graham dies, Gov. Henry McMaster appoints his sister Darline Graham to his seat, and before the funeral flowers have even wilted, she’s on Sean Hannity announcing that, yes, she’s running for the full six-year term. Somewhere, the concept of a cooling-off period is sobbing quietly into a copy of the Federalist Papers.

Trump, naturally, is already there with his trademark rubber stamp, issuing a "complete and total endorsement" of Graham as the proper vessel to "honor the legacy" of her brother — which in practice means keeping a reliable Trump vote in the Senate and reassuring the base that nothing will interrupt the flow of judicial nominations and authoritarian cosplay. Darline leans on prayer, family, and three decades of behind-the-scenes work in the state, while the rest of the GOP field (Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman, plus perennial also-ran businessman Mark Lynch) gets to fight over who can lose most efficiently to the anointed sibling.

The winner of this special primary gets to face Democrat Annie Andrews, but the real contest here isn’t policy; it’s whether South Carolina Republicans want open competition or a dynastic relay race where you just pass the Senate seat down like grandma’s silver. Representative democracy, now with more bloodlines and fewer illusions.

Donald Trump, America’s leading experiment in what happens when you mix reality TV with nuclear codes, has recommended that South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appoint Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to finish Graham’s Senate term. He announced this on Truth Social, because of course he did, calling it a “fabulous tribute” – which is one way of describing the idea that U.S. Senate seats are now sentimental family heirlooms to be passed down like grandma’s china.

McMaster is holding a press conference to announce his pick, while his spokesperson pretends this isn’t just a public audition for who can flatter Trump the hardest. Sen. Tim Scott quickly endorsed the idea, praising Graham’s sister as the perfect choice because she understands Lindsey’s love of family, South Carolina, and country – a criteria list that conspicuously skips literally anything about qualifications for the job. The state’s political class is already circling the open seat like vultures at a donor retreat, but Trump has made it clear he’d really like to see a short-term test run of the “American political dynasties, but make it MAGA” model.

Under South Carolina law, whoever gets appointed will only hold the seat until January, when voters pick a permanent replacement in a special election. So this isn’t so much representation as a six-month cosplay of hereditary rule. Between Trump’s public pressure, the GOP’s reflexive eagerness to comply, and the casual assumption that a Senate seat is a family memento to be lovingly displayed in the Capitol, the line between a republic and a small-town fiefdom keeps getting blurrier.

Michigan Democrats are being offered the usual exciting choice between a Medicare for All Muslim progressive who calls Israeli policy "genocide and apartheid" – Abdul El-Sayed – and an "establishment" candidate, Haley Stevens, whose main policy innovation is being backed by Chuck Schumer and at least $16m in Super PAC money, including AIPAC, which is furious that El-Sayed won’t recite the magic words about Israel’s "right to exist as a Jewish state." El-Sayed’s position is that Israel obviously exists and maybe the US shouldn’t bankroll war crimes instead of schools. Naturally, this has triggered the bipartisan Washington reflex: deploy the donor air force.

Mallory McMorrow has dropped out, taking with her the last pretense of a center-left, non–Super PAC–engineered option for the seat Gary Peters is vacating. Now it’s a clean test: can a candidate backed by Sanders and AOC survive a tidal wave of outside cash designed to teach Democrats that criticizing an allied government’s apartheid system is hazardous to one’s career prospects?

Meanwhile, in the background noise of late-stage American democracy: Congress is advancing a "Ratepayer Protection Act" for the data center boom that consumer advocates say won’t actually protect ratepayers, but does make Big Tech feel very seen; a Republican, Carlos Giménez, is begging the Trump White House not to deport 350,000 Haitians into chaos after the Supreme Court blessed the TPS cut-off; and The Atlantic has kindly re-upped JD Vance’s 10-year-old essay calling Trump "cultural heroin" so everyone can fully appreciate how completely he sold out to become vice president. It’s a helpful reminder that in this system, principles are mostly what you trade in for a shot at power and a bigger Super PAC.

Republican voters in Georgia have bravely stood up to Donald Trump’s influence by rejecting his endorsed fake elector Burt Jones and instead rallying behind Rick Jackson, a billionaire who spent over $100 million to convince them he’s the Trumpiest non-Trump on the ballot. Democracy is alive and well, provided you can light nine figures on fire to prove you’re an America First outsider who also happens to be rich enough to buy every ad slot between SEC football games.

Jackson plastered the airwaves with spots calling himself a “straight-talking, Trump-supporting self-made outsider,” while Jones ran on the more traditional platform of having literally tried to help overturn the 2020 election as part of the alternate elector scheme. Trump blessed Jones as a “fanatic” for election fraud claims, Brian Kemp showed up late with an endorsement like a dad at a recital, and still the base chose the guy who acts like Trump over the guy who helped him undermine the vote.

Helping move this inspiring tale of grassroots billionairedom along: Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, who vouched that Jackson is so rich he doesn’t even have to do this, which has somehow become a moral credential in Republican politics instead of a blazing red oligarchy siren. Don Jr. chimed in online to declare that either way it was a win for MAGA, which is true in the sense that whether Georgia ends up with a democracy-skeptical fake elector or a mega-rich Trump cosplayer as governor, the GOP has firmly established that the choices are now: authoritarian, or authoritarian with better ad buys.

Mark Carney, former central banker, UN climate envoy, Davos heart-throb and author of Very Serious Climate Words™, is now prime minister of Canada and has decided the best way to confront an "existential threat" is to, uh, set the climate plan on fire and throw a pipeline on top. Next to Donald Trump, he still looks like a responsible adult – which tells you more about Trump’s America than it does about Carney’s Canada.

After activists helped put him in power expecting a climate hawk, Carney’s first big move was to scrap the consumer carbon price and then systematically gut almost every meaningful mandate: methane rules weakened and delayed, a clean electricity standard pushed from 2035 to 2050 with new gas plants invited back in, the long-fought oil and gas emissions cap tossed, anti-greenwashing laws flagged for rollback, and zero-emission vehicle mandates kneecapped so hard EV sales cratered. It’s like watching someone take a carefully built climate Jenga tower and play it drunk, blindfolded, and sponsored by Suncor.

He’s also gone full petro-state cosplay: fast-tracking LNG terminals and pipelines, carving out deregulated "nation-building" zones, shoveling tax credits at carbon capture schemes that conveniently help frack more oil, and launching a so-called "sovereign wealth fund" that looks suspiciously like a public-money firehose for new fossil infrastructure. A windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies riding the Iran war to record profits? Absolutely not – can’t have the donors feeling pinched.

The climax came with a cozy deal with Alberta premier Danielle Smith – whose base includes a Trump-backed separatist movement – to clear the way for yet another bitumen pipeline while dramatically weakening Alberta’s industrial carbon price. The result: a carbon price that was supposed to hit $170/tonne by 2030 now limps to $130 by 2040, prompting even the mild-mannered Canadian Climate Institute to say net zero by 2050 is now fantasy. Carney’s defenders swear this is all 4D chess to keep Canada united; what it actually looks like is the familiar Trump-era formula: appease the loudest reactionaries, reward fossil oligarchs, and hope nobody notices the climate promises dissolving in a haze of PR and pipeline approvals.