The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican in a majority-Hispanic South Florida district, has done the unthinkable: she looked at Trump’s immigration enforcement regime and decided maybe openly cheering on family separation cosplay and mass deportation fantasies isn’t the vibe her voters are going for. So she’s running ads criticizing Trump’s immigration enforcement, which in today’s GOP is just one step short of confessing to reading the 14th Amendment.

This is billed as a “rare move,” because it still is. The party that spent years chanting "build the wall" is now discovering that some of their districts are full of the very people Trump’s policies treat as collateral damage. Salazar isn’t exactly storming ICE facilities with a copy of the Geneva Conventions, but she’s at least willing to say out loud that Trump’s immigrant-crushing spectacle might not be a winning strategy in a district where families actually know what those raids and crackdowns look like up close.

So no, this isn’t a moral awakening so much as a survival instinct. But every crack in the façade of lockstep support for Trump’s immigration cruelty is one more reminder that the “tough on the border” brand is built on real people’s fear and suffering—and that even some Republicans are starting to realize there’s only so much state-sanctioned harassment their own constituents will tolerate.

Trump spent years promising that he alone could make everything cheaper, as if the economy were a late-night infomercial where you just shout "DEALS!" into a microphone and inflation taps out. NPR checks in with three swing voters in Pennsylvania who have made the shocking discovery that you cannot, in fact, pay for gas with campaign rhetoric or buy groceries using a rerun of a Trump rally.

As the midterms creep closer, these voters talk about "affordability" the way economists do: in terms of rent, food, and basic survival, not how many gold-plated NFTs the former president can unload in a week. The grand promise of lower prices has somehow translated into people doing math at the checkout line and wondering why the guy who said he’d fix everything with tariffs, deregulation, and vibes hasn’t delivered a magical rollback on their bills.

So the sales pitch is colliding with reality: Trumpworld keeps insisting the economy is thriving, while actual humans in swing states are staring at receipts like they’re reading a horror novel. Call it the Make America Affordable Again pledge: great slogan, terrible implementation, and absolutely no refunds.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn has won the GOP primary for governor of Tennessee, proving that if you spend enough money stapling Trump’s compliments to every available surface, Republican voters will happily promote you from sabotaging the Senate to potentially running an entire state. At 74, Blackburn is poised to become Tennessee’s first female governor, which would be a milestone for women everywhere who dream of smashing glass ceilings while rolling back abortion rights and attacking trans people for sport.

The race was a Trumpist purity pageant where the only real disagreement was which candidate he liked more on Air Force One. Trump publicly gushed that Blackburn is “an incredible person” and did a “fantastic job,” then privately refused to endorse her because he’s also buddies with Rep. John Rose, who tried to buy the governor’s mansion with $13 million of his own money. So Tennessee got the rare experience of a Republican primary where Trump didn’t officially pick a favorite — he just let them fight over who could hug his shadow the tightest.

Blackburn’s win keeps the MAGA pipeline fully operational: from House backbencher to Senate culture-war attack drone to likely governor of a deep-red state. On deck: more crusades against reproductive rights, more performative China-bashing, and more demonization of trans people, all wrapped in the language of “freedom” that somehow never extends to anyone with a uterus or the wrong gender marker. Tennessee may be getting its first woman governor; democracy and civil rights, however, will not be getting their first break.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was literally designed so Americans and Canadians could share books, music, and the radical notion that crossing an imaginary line on the floor shouldn’t require a Homeland Security briefing. For over 100 years, people just… walked in. Together. Across a strip of black tape that marked the border. No cages, no razor wire, no CBP cosplay.

Then the Trump administration showed up and decided that the true national security threat was clearly 72-year-old Quebec grandmothers returning romance novels. New rules from Washington effectively banned Canadians from using the historic main entrance on the Vermont side, turning a shared cultural space into yet another front in the endless war on normal human interaction.

So now the community has had to spend serious money carving a new Quebec-only entrance out of a former emergency exit, patching over Trump’s bureaucratic tantrum with bake sales and fundraising drives. Public cross-border friendship is now an architectural problem citizens have to privately solve, because the federal government is too busy guarding a strip of tape from librarians and opera fans. Truly, the northern border has never been safer from story time.

The Trump Education Department has discovered a bold new frontier in "civil rights" enforcement: stopping it. The agency just tore up settlements that Obama and Biden officials negotiated with five school districts and a college, agreements that required schools to actually follow federal civil rights law for transgender students. Cape Henlopen in Delaware, Fife in Washington, Delaware Valley in Pennsylvania, plus La Mesa-Spring Valley, Sacramento City Unified, and Taft College in California all just got a friendly reminder that Washington is done backing up trans kids.

This isn’t a one-off clerical tweak; it’s the first time the administration has openly torched existing civil-rights settlements because they protected the wrong kind of students. While some districts like Sacramento are gamely insisting they’ll keep supporting LGBTQ+ students, the federal government has essentially hung a sign on the Office for Civil Rights door that says: "Trans kids need not apply."

Assistant secretary for civil rights Kimberly Richey helpfully explained that this is all about shielding girls’ and women’s sports and locker rooms from the terrifying menace of… teenagers trying to use the bathroom and play sports with their peers. She denounced prior administrations for a "radical transgender agenda," which apparently consisted of "enforcing the law as written and interpreted by courts." The same administration that sues states for letting trans students play on teams is now proudly withdrawing from agreements that made districts comply with Title IX. Nothing says "equal protection" like ripping up civil-rights settlements to own the kids.

The Oklahoma City Thunder, reigning NBA champions and apparently scheduling geniuses, will not be visiting Donald Trump’s White House while they’re already in Washington, DC. Officially, it’s a “timing issue”, which is sports PR for: “We’d rather run wind sprints until we puke than stand quietly behind a rambling man who calls us ‘the Oklahoma City Thunders’.” The team insists they’re “appreciative and grateful” for the communication, the way you’re very “appreciative and grateful” when your landlord texts instead of calling before raising the rent.

What used to be a bland civic tradition — win trophy, meet president, eat cold canapés, escape — is now yet another loyalty test in Trump’s ongoing project to turn the presidency into a culture-war game show. NBA teams have basically been running a four-corners offense around him for years: the Warriors didn’t go, the Raptors didn’t go, the Thunder already did their normal-person White House trip under Biden, and now everyone suddenly has a scheduling conflict whenever Trump’s in the building. The WNBA’s Aces, serial visitors under Biden, also appear to have misplaced their calendars since 2025.

Meanwhile, Trump still gets his photo-ops with more compliant outfits: MLS’s Inter Miami (never underestimate the power of a Messi selfie), the Florida Panthers, and the men’s Olympic hockey team, while the women’s team likewise developed a suspicious outbreak of “timing and previous commitments”. The result is a two-tiered system of civic ritual: teams that want to be props in the Trump Show, and teams that suddenly discover that their only available window to meet the president is sometime after he leaves office again. Democracy may be wobbling, but at least professional athletes have figured out how to run the clock.