Ukraine’s military is still watching the "Star" in Starlink stand for stalled after Trump triumphantly announced that Elon Musk had heroically restored service. On the ground, connections to Starshield — the supposedly hardened, military-grade flavor of Starlink that Ukraine uses to track and stop Russian missiles and drones — are still failing. So you’ve got a hot war, incoming Russian hardware, and the main defense network running like hotel Wi-Fi at a budget conference center.
The White House, of course, got out ahead of reality, with Trump declaring everything fixed while Ukraine’s operators were still staring at spinning wheels and dead terminals. Musk, the unelected shadow Secretary of Defense, once again sits at the center of U.S. and allied security policy because we outsourced a critical wartime communications backbone to a moody billionaire who treats coverage maps like a Patreon tier. Authoritarian Russia is launching missiles; America is launching press releases and hoping Elon's feelings align with NATO’s interests. What could possibly go wrong.
Trump studies a map of tariffs and swing states, then decides Canadian valves must pay for Susan Collins’ sixth term.
The White House has graciously announced that, starting 30 October, it will stop punching some Canadian products in the face and will instead punch different Canadian products in the face. Plywood, paper, machinery, and refrigeration gear are getting a break, while valves, carpets, and waste products get promoted to the front lines of Trump’s economic hostage situation. It’s less a trade strategy and more like spinning a tariff roulette wheel and calling it leadership.
Why the sudden burst of generosity toward Canadian plywood? The Wall Street Journal reports that the exemptions, conveniently focused on agricultural and forestry products, are designed to help Susan Collins and other Republicans survive the midterms. Collins rushed out a statement bragging that she had "secured" exemptions for products vital to Maine’s farmers — blueberry, potato, apple, and seaweed producers — because nothing says free-market conservatism like begging the Dear Leader to temporarily stop wrecking your constituents’ livelihoods.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney politely noted that Canada is open to a mutually beneficial deal but is also perfectly willing to wait for a future US administration that isn’t trying to run trade policy like a reality show stunt. Meanwhile, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, who spent months cheering on the tariffs in campaign ads, is now calling on Trump to end the standoff after discovering that his trade-reliant state actually relies on, tragically, trade. The leopards-ate-my-face caucus remains stunned that the leopard has teeth.
So the US isn’t really ending the trade war with Canada, it’s just rearranging which industries get kneecapped so a few nervous Republicans can film campaign ads about how hard they fought to fix the mess their own party made. Strong, coherent economic policy this is not; it’s vote-buying with tariffs and hoping nobody notices the bill.
Behold, the terrifyingly complex Alaska ballot: two Sullivans, four names, and one Justice Department having a full constitutional meltdown over alphabetical order.
The Trump administration has discovered a brand new constitutional principle: elections are only valid if the Republican wins. The Justice Department is suing to stop Alaska from certifying its Senate race if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola, because there’s another Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot and apparently the republic cannot survive two guys with the same name on one piece of paper.
Rather than trust Alaskans to read a ballot that clearly labels one as "Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr." with no party and the other as "Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent," Trump’s DOJ argues that voters will be so hopelessly baffled by ranked-choice voting and duplicate Sullivans that the election should be treated as suspect. The government insists this "frivolous candidacy" endangers the "integrity" of the election, and claims it somehow violates the National Voter Registration Act — a law about making voter registration easier, now repurposed as a tool to protect a sitting GOP senator from potential embarrassment.
State courts in Alaska already ruled that yes, the other Sullivan gets to run, and no, bureaucrats don’t get to psychoanalyze his "private motivations" and boot him for theoretical confusion. So Trump’s DOJ steps in to announce that if their Dan loses and they can argue that votes "should have" gone to him, they’ll demand an investigation and move to block certification. It’s not election interference, you see — it’s just the federal government reserving the right to overturn state-certified results whenever Republicans don’t like the outcome.
Donald Trump explains that the Constitution is very strong, very powerful, and therefore cannot possibly apply to him personally.
At a rally in Iowa, Donald Trump told his fans he has "the right to run again" for president, casually workshopping the idea of a third term like he's ordering a third dessert. The 22nd Amendment says two terms, the ex-president says "lol no" – and guess which one his crowd believes.
This is not a legal theory so much as a vibes-based coup preview. Trump has been repeating this claim for years, slowly turning "I should get a third term" from an outrageous joke into a recurring bit, into a talking point, into a potential plan. The more he says it, the more his base hears: the Constitution is optional, democracy is negotiable, and power is something you simply keep if your followers scream loudly enough.
So here we are: a man who once put his hand on a Bible and swore to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution is now openly telling rally-goers that the term limits in that same Constitution don't apply to him. American democracy is being beta-tested at an Iowa campaign stop, and the guy holding the mic thinks he's user one, admin access included.
Donald Trump has discovered a bold new threat to American national security: wind turbine parts. Yes, the same blades he’s been ranting about for years are now, according to an official presidential memo, being imported “under such circumstances” that they endanger the nation. Terrorists, cyberattacks, nuclear proliferation, and now…spinning sticks that make electricity.
The punchline? After solemnly invoking national security, the administration then decides not to impose tariffs or any meaningful restriction. So we’re apparently under grave threat from foreign nacelles and rotor hubs, but not enough of a threat to do anything beyond issue a memo and hope Fox & Friends runs a chyron. It’s security theater without even the effort of building a set: just Trump, a pen, and his long-running personal vendetta against renewable energy dressed up as statecraft.
What this actually does is further weaponize the phrase “national security” until it means “whatever Donald is mad at this week.” Today it’s wind turbines, tomorrow it’s solar panels, next week maybe toasters that don’t say MAGA. Meanwhile, every time the White House slaps that label on a petty culture war target, it erodes the credibility of genuine security decisions. But sure, let’s keep pretending that the real threat to America is a Danish wind blade and not the guy casually turning emergency powers into a punchline.
Progressives are discovering a radical new concept: if you impeach a president twice, he gets acquitted twice, comes back, and keeps governing like a mob boss with a nuclear arsenal, maybe the problem isn’t a lack of floor speeches. Rashida Tlaib’s 2019 "we're gonna impeach the motherfucker" battle cry has now evolved into "we'll still have a Trump administration for the next two years to hold accountable," which is a polite way of saying: the Senate will keep laundering his crimes while we pretend this is a functioning constitutional system.
New lefty candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier and Melat Kiros are asking the forbidden question: does Trump actually want another impeachment so he can turn it into premium grievance content for his rallies and fundraising spam? They’re calling for "material changes" instead of #Resistance fanfic, while Delia Ramirez warns impeachment can’t just be a "political messaging strategy"—a bold stance in a town that treats C-SPAN like TikTok for aging committee chairs. Adam Hamawy says Americans are "tired of theater," which is unfortunate, because theater is pretty much the only power Congress has left that isn’t already signed over to the unitary executive and his favorite TV lawyers.
Meanwhile, Al Green and Shri Thanedar — the guys who kept slamming the "impeach" button like it was a casino slot machine — just lost their primaries, replaced by candidates who want broader anti-establishment chaos instead of narrow anti-Trump pageantry. Even the new crop of lefties is starting to sound like Hakeem Jeffries and Jamie Raskin: impeachment should be a tool, not a foregone conclusion, especially when the Senate’s main constitutional role is now "rubber-stamping authoritarian precedent". So while Trump himself is momentarily off the impeachment chopping block, his Cabinet isn’t: the House is gearing up for a possible run at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, because if you can’t meaningfully constrain the president, you might as well start nibbling at the henchmen.
Amy Acton, seen here attempting to run for governor in a country where the president thinks your childhood sexual abuse is just opposition research fodder.
Donald Trump stepped outside the White House to once again prove there is no moral floor, proudly defending Vivek Ramaswamy’s $4 million attack ad that parades Amy Acton’s estranged mother on TV to call her a “liar” — while neatly airbrushing out the part where Acton says she was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather. Confronted with that context, Trump shrugged it off: it’s just “a mother speaking badly” about her daughter, and if his mother did that, the “Fake News” would apparently build a statue to the ad. Yes, the president’s official position is now that exploiting an alleged child sex abuse survivor’s family trauma is valid campaign strategy.
That wasn’t quite vile enough, so he also took time to insult an NBC reporter as a “horrible little reporter” and a “fresh person” for asking follow-ups, then declared that Republicans criticizing the ad “don’t know the facts.” The fact he likes is that the mother looks “very lucid” and “very smart” on camera — unlike, say, the court records showing the stepfather was indicted for raping a child under 13. Those are the kind of facts this White House finds deeply inconvenient.
Even some Republicans managed to locate a spine for five consecutive seconds: Gov. Mike DeWine called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling” (while still backing Ramaswamy, because party over basic decency), Nancy Mace labeled it “the most shameful, disgusting, offensive ad this election season,” and others begged for it to be pulled. Vice President JD Vance, ever the performative tough guy, told them all to “stop whining” and focus on winning. The message from Trump-Vance world is clear: if weaponizing a survivor’s estranged, allegedly abusive parent helps you grab power, the only real sin is complaining about it on camera.
JD Vance discovers, after extensive research and polling, that children eating is good actually.
The Trump administration has heroically decided, in the year of our lord 2026, that maybe food stamp cards should have the same basic security technology your bank rolled out when Obama still had the nuclear codes. After $470 million in SNAP benefits were stolen in a single year thanks to ancient mag-stripe EBT cards, USDA is finally proposing a rule to require chip and tap-to-pay tech nationwide. This cutting-edge innovation has only been standard on credit cards for, oh, a decade.
The rule has allegedly been in the works since 2023 but was delayed by — you’ll never guess — understaffing at USDA and a regulatory backlog made worse by the Department of Government Efficiency’s budget machete. Also not helping: Trump’s "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that slashed state administrative funding for SNAP, i.e., the exact money states needed to upgrade their cards in the first place. Now the feds are mandating a national overhaul that could cost $283 million, while Congress can’t decide if it wants to pay for it, even though we’re losing more than $600 million a year to thieves.
In a plot twist worthy of bad prestige TV, JD Vance has abruptly pivoted from sneering about Lamborghini-driving food stamp queens to solemnly declaring SNAP "one of the most important social service programs" in America. The same guy who wrote that recipients "live off of government largesse" is now onstage in Ohio delivering misty-eyed monologues about full bellies and sacred tax dollars. No explanation offered for this spiritual awakening, but it does line up nicely with ProPublica, NPR, and others making it painfully obvious that the real fraud problem is organized theft from poor families, not poor families themselves.
So yes, chip cards for SNAP are an actual improvement that will help real people. They’re also a convenient way for the administration to pose as anti-fraud crusaders cleaning up a mess their own budget cuts and years of regulatory foot-dragging helped create. First you starve the program of admin money, then you mandate an expensive fix without guaranteed federal funding, then you hold a press conference about how much you care about hungry kids. Government efficiency, Trump-era style.
Locals gather at Hains Point to protest Trump's plan to convert their public park into yet another shrine to his short game.
East Potomac Park was created in 1897 to be 'forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people.' Naturally, President Trump looked at that sentence and seems to have read: 'for the recreation and pleasure of one guy who really likes golf and branding things with his own last name.'
Locals who use Hains Point to run, bike, picnic, birdwatch, and generally exist without paying greens fees are now watching the president try to turn their rare, accessible public oasis into an upgraded golf playground. The park’s wide, flat loop — a staple of the Marine Corps Marathon and daily training ground for thousands — would be carved up or cut off in service of Trump's dream redesign of the municipal course, which just happens to sit in postcard range of the White House.
Congress said this land belongs to the people; Trump heard 'great starter kit for a private club.' Residents are protesting, because they foolishly believed "public" meant something, and because they know once this administration gets its hands on a federal asset, the odds of it staying open, affordable, and not wrapped in gold leaf drop faster than Trump’s approval rating in a fact-checking convention.
Kansas debate night, where the Republican tries to defend Trump’s golden age while the Democrat politely asks if voters would prefer slightly less corruption and fewer wars.
Voters keep insisting on caring about boring things like "affordability", "corruption" and "the administration’s deadly immigration crackdown", which is very rude of them given that Donald Trump is busy declaring a "new golden age" from inside his gold-plated reality tunnel. A new poll finds most Americans think he's using the presidency to enrich himself, his approval is circling the drain, and on almost every issue except crime, they trust Democrats more. On immigration, the signature let them die at the border policy, Republicans have actually managed to lose their lead. Strong work all around.
Rather than do the usual midterm damage control of pretending to listen to people who can't afford groceries, Trump has chosen the more on-brand option: change the subject and set something on fire. Over the summer, he and his allies tried to revive Red Scare fan fiction by warning that Democrats are crawling with communists. When that didn't move the numbers, he floated a $5,000 "Trump dividend" for every citizen, which was immediately recognized by everyone with a pulse as an election-season bribe dressed up as economic vision.
Now, with the Iran war he launched in February still hanging over everything, he's decided to pivot to Ukraine like it's a new season of a failing show. The White House is bragging about a "stunning" deal to buy Russian diesel, pausing sanctions Congress passed on Moscow, and casually suggesting Volodymyr Zelenskyy should resign—because nothing says "America First" like rewarding Putin while you're already bogged down in another Middle East disaster. The governing party's closing argument appears to be: ignore the corruption, ignore the body count, and please focus on this limited-time cash offer and some recycled Cold War hysteria.
Out in Kansas, a Democrat is actually competitive for a Senate seat for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt was a fresh face, largely by promising to turn down the heat while Trump and JD Vance sprint around the country with a flamethrower. The GOP bet is that voters will forget about the bribes, the self-dealing, and the foreign policy dumpster fire if they just shout "communism" and "crime" loudly enough. Bold strategy for an administration polling underwater on almost everything except its ability to enrich Donald Trump.
Trump proudly points at a shrimp cocktail while an aide frantically checks whether it qualifies for the new optional patriotism sticker.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in governance: stickers. The FDA is rolling out a voluntary "U.S. Caught Seafood" label so shoppers can feel patriotic while buying fish, assuming the grocery store feels like participating in this wet-paper-bag version of regulation. It’s not mandatory, it’s not enforced, but it will be mentioned in a campaign speech, which is the only compliance that really matters.
Naturally, this sudden concern for transparency in the seafood aisle just happens to surface while Trump is in Florida stumping for Ashley Moody and Byron Donalds, before retiring to Mar-a-Lago to rest from the grueling work of turning federal policy into campaign merch. As a bonus, the White House is prepping $5 billion in USDA loans for the fishing industry to buy new equipment—right on schedule for the final midterm blitz, where every swing state apparently gets its own little taxpayer-funded raffle prize.
So the pitch is: a nonbinding label and a massive loan program wrapped in a campaign stop, marketed as economic policy rather than what it actually is—another round of "use the federal government as a campaign ATM and hope nobody reads past the headline." At least the fish have an excuse for looking glassy-eyed.
Max Miller, noted defender of family values, prepares to bravely stand his ground against a toddler and her blue bunny.
Ohio GOP Rep. Max Miller — former Trump aide, heir to a real estate fortune, and apparently part-time stuffed animal hostage taker — is somehow still on the ballot despite a stack of allegations that reads like a CPS training scenario. Court filings say his ex-wife Emily Moreno accused him of throwing boiling water at her, holding a gun to her head, shoving her against a wall, and possibly injuring their toddler, whose collarbone bruise pattern allegedly resembled a handprint. Child abuse investigators ultimately labeled the case "unsubstantiated," which in American politics now seems to mean "excellent House Republican material."
His former father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno, calls him unfit for office and in need of "serious psychological help" — and then adds the detail that Miller allegedly withheld his granddaughter’s beloved blue bunny for 48 hours. Multiple times. From a crying toddler. As a power move. Miller says it’s all lies; texts say otherwise. Naturally, the Trump White House alumni club sprang into action: Trump calls Miller a "good guy," the White House urges Republicans not to pressure him to drop out, and Speaker Mike Johnson shrugs that "people have domestic disputes" as if this is a sitcom misunderstanding and not a police file.
Into this toxic spill walks Democrat Brian Poindexter, a rebar guy and councilman whose big scandal is being a dorky "girl dad" who plays Fortnite with his daughters and shows up for family dinner. His campaign ad features his kids clowning on his dance moves and thanking him for being present, while Miller’s greatest hits involve depositions, gym-hopping, and allegations of violence. The race, once "likely Republican" in a district Trump won easily, is now a toss-up because even in Ohio, there’s only so much alleged bunny-torturing domestic chaos voters can be asked to swallow for the team.
So the contrast is now: Poindexter, the steelworker dad with a garage campaign and three daughters roasting him on camera, versus Miller, the Trumpist incumbent whose party leadership has decided that alleged abuse, a broken toddler collarbone, and a hostage plush toy situation are all just part of the modern Republican family values package. The GOP keeps telling us "candidate quality" doesn’t matter. Ohio’s 7th is about to test just how low that bar can sink before voters finally trip over it.
Nikki Floris, former FBI election-security official, testifies in 2019, blissfully unaware that a few years later the government would be run by people who think Jeanine Pirro should be in charge of justice.
The Trump Justice Department has decided that if you can’t win elections, you can at least prosecute the people who tried to protect them. Two former senior FBI officials, Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides — both frequent targets of Trump-world rage for working on election security and foreign influence — have been hit with a rarely charged criminal count of allegedly lying to Congress about their roles in the Hunter Biden investigations. Because nothing says "rule of law" like weaponizing an obscure statute against the people who spent years trying to stop foreign governments from hijacking U.S. elections.
U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro (yes, that Jeanine Pirro) proudly announced that the pair surrendered, accusing them of lying about their work on the Foreign Influence Task Force and the FBI’s Hunter Biden probes. Floris’ lawyers responded that she’s being sacrificed so the administration can "push a false narrative" for election-season clout, pointing out the charges are landing years later and conveniently right before voters head to the polls. Meanwhile, D.C. grand juries — who already refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress in an earlier Trump-era stunt case — still haven’t signed off on this one either, which tells you how impressed local citizens are with Pirro’s fan-fiction prosecutions.
Floris, who served as the FBI’s security lead for the 2020 election that Trump still insists was "stolen," is now being treated like the real threat to democracy, rather than the mob that beat cops and smashed their way into the Capitol on Jan. 6. Benavides, who worked on election security and Chinese intelligence, is getting the same treatment for the crime of having done his job while Trump was screaming about deep states on Twitter. Republicans claim these officials buried a China election-influence report to protect then-Director Chris Wray; intelligence professionals say it was a standard pullback of shaky intel. So naturally, the Trump DOJ is siding with the conspiracy caucus and using federal criminal law as its personal revenge machine.
In a functioning democracy, you protect people who safeguard elections from foreign interference. In Trump’s America, you elevate Jeanine Pirro to federal prosecutor and let her chase the FBI’s election cops with a legal butterfly net, while calling it "justice." Totally normal, very stable government behavior.
Bo Hines, freshly spun from the Trump White House to the Tether money hose, demonstrating that the real bipartisan consensus is: always get your cut.
The Fellowship PAC — a crypto-soaked super PAC that once serenaded Donald Trump as the second coming of Satoshi — has decided that its true ideological home is wherever the friendliest regulators live. After launching with breathless promises of a $100 million war chest to boost Republicans, the group is now spending exclusively on Democrats, but only the ones who rank as crypto all-stars on industry scorecards. Naturally, the PAC’s ad money is being laundered through Nxum Group, a firm co-founded by Trump’s former crypto whisperer, Bo Hines, because why just buy politicians when you can also pay yourself along the way?
Hines’s résumé reads like a case study in Washington corruption with a blockchain veneer. Before Trump’s election, he pumped a Trump-themed meme coin that made a few people rich before collapsing — a helpful audition for serving as head of Trump’s White House Council of Advisers on Digital Assets. From that perch, he helped push through stablecoin rules that conveniently benefited Tether, while Tether was simultaneously paying money to his firm, Nxum. He swore it was just a "passive investment" and that he had nothing to do with the business dealings, which is exactly what you’d say if you were definitely not running a side hustle out of the West Wing.
Once Hines floated out of the Trump administration in August 2025, Tether announced him as CEO of its U.S. arm a month later, because of course it did. Tether’s banking partner, Cantor Fitzgerald, then kicked $10 million into Fellowship PAC, whose chair just happens to be Tether’s VP of regulatory affairs. That PAC is now dropping $600,000 via Nxum Group to boost Democrats like Ritchie Torres, Maggie Goodlander, and Mark Warner — none of whom are in real danger of losing, but all of whom are cozy with crypto and publicly critical of Trump’s personal $TRUMP meme coin, which has already shoveled $1.4 billion into his pockets. Trump’s people write the rules, cash out, then fund the opposition that calls him a grifter, all while everyone insists there’s no coordination and no corruption. Truly, a genius new era of bipartisan forever-grifting.
Jesse Kelly, broadcasting live from the heart of America’s outrage-industrial complex, where integrity goes to take a three-hour ad break.
Jesse Kelly, a 6'8" monument to conservative grievance, calmly explains over suburban Red Lobster that Trump worship has been "easy radio" – you just "powder Trump’s butt all day long" and the checks clear. Now that the regime is limping into its final two years, Kelly and his colleagues are delicately transitioning from full-time glorified hype men to slightly skeptical war critics, because $4-a-gallon gas and a fresh Iran war are bad for ratings.
He insists he’s not "anti-Trump" – he just thinks the people who worship everything Trump does are "ridiculous and stupid human beings" while he continues to call Democrats "sick, evil and demonic" on air. So yes, the guy who spent years feeding the authoritarian cult is now drawing a very fine line between "honest broker" and "I just followed orders for Premiere Networks."
Media lifer Michael Harrison helpfully describes all this as "positioning" in a giant game of right-wing musical chairs, where hosts scramble to keep their brands alive after the Dear Leader shuffles off the stage. The conservative talk world isn’t exactly reckoning with its role in killing democracy; it’s just workshopping new ways to sell the same rage to a post-Trump audience.
Ilhan Omar’s home, shortly before Trump’s DOJ tried to redefine “American citizen” as “people Donald likes this week.”
Trump’s Department of Justice has apparently decided that naturalized Americans come with a return to sender option. Around 6 a.m., roughly two dozen federal agents raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home, seizing her phone, passport, notebooks, and computers, and dragging her family into grand jury subpoenas. The stated concern is her citizenship; the actual problem, as always, is that she’s a Black Muslim woman who dared to get elected and talk about the Constitution like it applies to her too.
The Supreme Court has said, repeatedly, that naturalized citizens aren’t supposed to be a second-class, revocable product. For decades, denaturalization was rare and generally reserved for, you know, war criminals, not members of Congress who annoy Donald Trump on TV. But this administration looked at that history and said, "challenge accepted." After bumping denaturalization cases from about 11 a year to 25 in Trump’s first term, they’ve now ordered DHS to cough up 100–200 cases per month, and told DOJ’s Civil Division to “prioritize and maximally pursue” stripping people’s citizenship like it’s a Black Friday sale.
So far they’ve identified 384 Americans for a “first wave,” filed at least 40 denaturalization actions in a matter of weeks, and lodged nearly 200 civil cases since January 2025. This isn’t law enforcement; it’s a loyalty test with paperwork. The message is clear: if you’re an immigrant, especially a person of color, your citizenship is only as secure as Trump’s mood. The administration is methodically turning equal membership in American society into a conditional privilege, revocable whenever the ruling clique decides you’re the wrong kind of citizen.
Jared Kushner, pictured here looking like he just remembered which offshore account he used this week.
Jared Kushner would like everyone to know that the new book alleging he had access to more than $2 billion in Middle Eastern "slush money" to buy influence in the U.S. government is, quote, "completely insane and never happened." Which is exactly what you’d say if Dutch intelligence really had front-row seats to your allegedly hacked iPhone while you logged into UAE-linked accounts stuffed with cash from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and a helpful Azerbaijani bank.
The book, Princes and Thieves (subtle!), claims that while Kushner was a senior White House adviser in charge of Middle East policy, foreign leaders quietly parked billions in accounts linked to him — some allegedly disguised as government entities or charities, supposedly to fund "off-the-books diplomatic objectives" like solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via the time-honored method of wiring the son-in-law. One Saudi account alone allegedly carried about $1 billion for Kushner’s "personal benefit," which is certainly one way to do public service.
Team Kushner has responded with the usual Trump-era defense kit: maximal outrage, zero specifics. Kushner and his lawyer furiously deny everything, insist there’s "not a single shred" of proof, and threaten vague legal action against, well, someone. The Trump White House comms shop chimed in to brand the Vanity Fair excerpt "bull**" from a "failed spy thriller writer" who relies on unnamed sources — which is rich coming from an administration that tried to run the country on anonymous Telegram posts and presidential vibes.
So for now we’re left with a familiar choice: either multiple foreign intelligence services, journalists, and sources have constructed an elaborate, documentation-free heist movie starring Jared Kushner’s iPhone, or the guy who walked out of the White House and immediately got $2 billion from the Saudis just coincidentally keeps getting accused of the exact same kind of foreign-money influence scheme he absolutely would never, ever do.
Artist’s impression of $46 billion in national insecurity being welded into place against a backdrop of mountains that were doing just fine on their own.
The Trump administration’s top border guy, Rodney Scott, has emerged from whatever bunker CBP keeps its worst ideas in to proudly defend a $46bn plan to lace the Big Bend region of Texas with 30-foot steel fencing, roads, and surveillance gear. This, in an area with historically low migrant crossings, but apparently a dangerously high concentration of intact ecosystems and happy local businesses that must be stopped at all costs.
A bipartisan coalition of landowners, environmentalists, and local businesses has the audacity to call this a waste of taxpayer money that will shred one of the most spectacular landscapes on the border. A judge even agreed enough to slap a court-ordered pause on construction, warning of “serious, irreparable harm” – at which point the administration ran to the supreme court to ask if they pretty please could keep bulldozing the desert while the lawsuits catch up.
Scott, whose job description under Trump is essentially "finish the wall, laws optional", insists that fortifying Big Bend is “non-negotiable” and predicts the region will be “completely overrun and destroyed” if it doesn’t get its share of steel. The fact that crossings there are low is, in this magical thinking, proof that a wall is urgently needed. CBP is bragging about building roughly 12 miles of barrier a week and being “ahead of schedule” on turning a 2,000-mile border into a monument to panic, contractor profits, and environmental devastation.
After bulldozers were caught tearing up ground inside Big Bend national park, Scott graciously ordered a “pause” and went on a listening tour, promising to figure out how to build the project so it doesn’t look like it’s mauling the park. He now says the giant steel fences won’t go in the national park itself because of ongoing lawsuits – a refreshing reminder that the only thing standing between protected lands and this administration’s wrecking crew is a judge with a spine and a temporary injunction.
The Trump administration, famously allergic to releasing any documents related to its own crimes, has boldly stepped forward to declassify...a matte-black flying triangle, some Cold War saucer gossip, and a raccoon hair sample from "Skinwalker Ranch." According to FBI and Pentagon reports, federal agents watched a 15-foot silent triangle rocket around like a fighter jet, with no visible propulsion and no sound, which frankly still makes more sense than anything that’s ever come out of Stephen Miller’s office.
Instead of, say, releasing White House visitor logs or notes from calls with Putin, the government is cranking out its seventh tranche of UFO files under Trump's order to hurry up and disclose UAP records. We get a declassified report about dog-like bipedal creatures, "little people," prehistoric birds, and an 8-foot maggot that turned out—after DNA testing—to be...a raccoon. Meanwhile, the documents are very careful not to reach any conclusions about aliens or national security threats, which is convenient, because ambiguity is the one thing this crowd can weaponize even better than racism.
So the public still doesn’t know if Trump is compromised by foreign governments, but we do know that in 1954 a Swedish pilot saw something weird and in Utah somebody took cryptid fan fiction way too seriously. It's the perfect Trump-era transparency project: flood the zone with spooky declassifications about space mysteries while stonewalling anything that might implicate actual earthbound criminals currently working in the West Wing.
The president emerged on Truth Social at 1 a.m. to announce that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is now 85 percent full and "looking really good," as if he'd just personally liberated Paris instead of signing off on a multimillion-dollar plumbing job. He also claimed the pool "hasn’t worked properly since 1922," which is an interesting take given the many decades of tourists somehow managing to reflect in it without his divine intervention.
Then comes the real tell: Trump bragged that "we have cameras set up" around the pool, turning a national monument into yet another stage for his security-state cosplay. Nothing says "land of the free" like wiring up the reflecting pool so Dear Leader can monitor the vibes.
So taxpayers get the bill, Trump gets the credit, history gets rewritten, and Lincoln’s memorial gets folded into the ongoing MAGA reality show. Infrastructure week has finally arrived, and it’s a surveillance-friendly birdbath in front of a president who couldn’t pass a basic civics quiz.
