america first, refugees white
Lady Liberty, now holding a clipboard marked "whites only" and a Mar-a-Lago guest list.
The Trump administration has discovered an emergency refugee situation: not the Afghans we abandoned, not Congolese or Sudanese civilians fleeing actual war, but white Afrikaners leaving a country where their unemployment rate is 12% compared with 48% for Black South Africans. The US will now boost white South African refugee admissions from about 7,500 to 17,500 this year, at a cost of $100m, after previously slashing the entire refugee program down to 7,500 total slots that were already earmarked mostly for them. Refugee policy has officially gone from “give us your tired, your poor” to “give us your lightly inconvenienced, but make sure they’re Dutch-descended.”
To sell this, the State Department is channeling Tucker Carlson fan fiction, warning of "escalating hostility" and government "race-based discrimination" against Afrikaners, while Trump keeps shouting about a debunked "white genocide" his own allies on the racist far right have been flogging for years. At the same time, the administration cut aid to South Africa, boycotted the G20 in Johannesburg, and then banned South Africa from this year’s G20 — conveniently being held at one of Trump’s Miami resorts, because of course it is. Foreign policy is now just a loyalty test crossed with a hotel rewards program.
South Africa’s unforgivable sin, according to Washington, includes raiding a US "refugee processing" center and deporting seven Kenyans who were working illegally — i.e., enforcing its own immigration laws, which you may recall is supposed to be sacred when done by white-run governments on Fox News. But when a Black-led government does it, suddenly it’s proof of anti-white persecution and grounds for an emergency airlift of people whose ancestors literally ran apartheid. The US went from resettling over 100,000 global refugees in 2024 to turning the program into a bespoke service for one favored white minority, while everyone else is told to enjoy the bombs, militias, and famine back home.
#racism#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
37% of republicans accidentally admit they'd prefer a party to a personality cult
A visual representation of the GOP: most arrows still pointing at Trump, one lonely bar labeled “new direction” quietly screaming for help.
Republican voters have spoken, and the message is clear: authoritarianism, yes; maybe a different flavor, also yes. A new New York Times/Siena poll finds that 55% of potential Republican supporters want the next nominee to “follow Donald Trump’s lead,” which presumably includes crushing internal dissent, starting deeply unpopular wars, and governing by Fox News segment. A mere 37% say they’d like a “new direction,” suggesting that over a third of the party has noticed that the flaming clown car is in fact on fire.
The details are a fun little autopsy of a functioning democracy. Among actual Republicans, 65% want more Trump, please. Among Republican-leaning independents, a majority would like to get off this ride before it reaches the Hague. Younger voters (18–44) overwhelmingly want a new direction, while voters 45 and up are apparently content to spend their golden years re-electing the guy whose approval rating with the general public is circling the drain at 37% as the war with Iran sends gas prices and body bags in the same direction: up.
Trump’s stranglehold on the base is doing real institutional work. His popularity inside the party has helped him purge insufficiently obedient Republicans in primaries in Louisiana and Indiana and bully GOP-run states into drawing friendlier House maps — you know, the usual “small government, local control” stuff, except the locality is wherever Donald Trump’s ego currently resides. All of this might still cost Republicans control of Congress, because outside the MAGA terrarium, voters are not thrilled about an unpopular war, a wildly unpopular president, and a party whose central organizing principle is personal loyalty to one man.
So yes, democracy is still technically on the ballot, but inside the GOP, the real question is: do you want Trumpism with Trump, or Trumpism with someone slightly better at pretending to read a briefing book?
#killing-democracy#fascism#forever-grifting
trump admin to americans: your phone is our phone now
Pictured: the kind of phone Trump’s DHS would very much like to crawl inside, live in, and redecorate with listening devices.
The Department of Homeland Security has decided the real threat to America isn’t violent extremists or corrupt officials; it’s your iPhone. ICE quietly admitted it’s using commercial spyware — the kind that can burrow into your phone, hoover up your data, and turn your pocket into a live mic — supposedly to chase terrorists and fentanyl traffickers. History shows these tools get used on journalists, human rights activists, political rivals, and diplomats, but sure, this time it’ll be different because the agency that ran family separation pinky swears.
Under Biden, the U.S. actually did something useful: blacklisted NSO Group and other spyware outfits, sanctioned specific players, signed an executive order limiting government use, and led a democratic coalition to push back on this industry of digital break-ins. That brief era of sanity is now being lovingly tossed into the shredder. The Trump administration has already lifted sanctions on people tied to the Predator spyware platform and even revived an ICE contract with Israeli-founded spyware company Paragon, because when every authoritarian government on Earth is abusing these tools, the only question Trump-world asks is: why aren’t we cashing in too?
Experts are warning that the U.S. is sliding away from being a (somewhat) restraining force on the global spyware trade and toward being just another enthusiastic customer with a security badge. So while privacy and civil rights advocates are frantically pointing out that these tools have been used to hack American officials and dissidents abroad, the Trump team seems more focused on making sure DHS has everything it needs to treat the Constitution as a quaint, optional add-on. Good news: the government may not fix your roads or process your passport, but it can absolutely read your texts.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s favorite hostage program hits its 30s
Ph.D. candidate and DACA recipient pauses from studying molecular biosciences to study something far more unstable: whether the U.S. government will remember she exists this renewal cycle.
The DACA generation is turning 30 and settling into adult milestones like careers, parenting, and the ever-popular American rite of passage: waking up one day to discover the federal government has quietly flipped the switch on your legal existence. Diana, a decade-long DACA recipient, finds her work permit suddenly lapsed, meaning she can’t drive, can’t go to a friend’s wedding, and gets to play the fun daily game of "is today the day I’m detained?" This is what passes for "law and order" in Trump’s America: build people’s lives around a program and then booby-trap the paperwork.
DACA was sold in 2012 as a temporary bridge while Congress found a permanent solution. Fourteen years, several performative floor speeches, and countless crocodile tears later, there’s still no bridge—just a rickety plank suspended over deportation. Recipients are now professionals, parents, Ph.D. candidates, community leaders… and perpetual hostages to whichever white guy in office wants to goose his base by threatening to yank their status. Republicans scream about "border chaos" while quietly manufacturing chaos for people who’ve spent most of their lives here, paying taxes and doing the jobs native-born citizens apparently can’t be bothered to do.
The Biden years have mostly meant more paperwork purgatory instead of open attacks, but Trump and his allies already did the real structural damage: turning DACA into a loaded gun on the Oval Office desk. Now USCIS delays and shifting rules make renewals a game of bureaucratic Russian roulette. You can have a degree, a mortgage, and kids in school, but if your renewal gets "lost" for a month, your life gets turned off like a streaming subscription. It’s not policy; it’s extortion with extra steps.
So as the DACA generation hits their 30s, they’ve achieved the American dream—just with a cage wrapped around it. They plan careers and families in two-year increments, because Congress would rather fund more border theatrics than pass a law acknowledging reality. The message from Trump’s GOP and its enablers is crystal clear: we’re happy to exploit your labor, your taxes, and your talents, but your humanity? That’s still "under review" at DHS.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
another primary day at the church of trump
Voters line up to decide which Republican has pledged the most undying loyalty to a man who tried to overturn their last election.
Six states are holding primaries, which NPR politely describes as a "test of President Trump's influence" instead of the more accurate "are Republicans still fully owned by one extremely loud Florida man." The ballots will technically list candidates’ names, but the real question being voted on is: who groveled most convincingly at the golden calf in Mar-a-Lago.
Instead of debating policy, governance, or basic reality, the GOP is once again running the same quiz show: Do you accept Dear Leader's latest conspiracy theory, yes or yes? Every race is framed not as "who will represent you" but "who will carry Trump's water with the least visible spine." American democracy: now with extra personality cult, still no refunds.
#killing-democracy#fascism
gop senator discovers constitution, immediately loses job
Bill Cassidy, moments after realizing that in today’s GOP, voting to uphold the Constitution is more disqualifying than helping an insurrectionist president keep his job.
Sen. Bill Cassidy just learned the hard way that in Trump’s GOP, voting to uphold the Constitution is a career-ending offense. Five years after he voted to convict Trump for inciting an insurrection, Cassidy lost his Louisiana primary and is now walking around the Capitol like a man who accidentally did the right thing in a party that treats the rule of law like a woke pronoun. He says he’s fine with it, insisting that having "voted to uphold the Constitution" in his obituary is enough. Bold strategy: choosing legacy over groveling to a guy who tried to overthrow the government.
The context here is bleakly simple: almost every Republican who voted to impeach or convict Trump is gone, because Trump has turned the party into a loyalty cult with a built-in purge function. Cassidy still mostly voted with Trump’s agenda, but that one time he sided with democracy instead of the mob? Disqualifying. Now he’s one of the few Republicans openly criticizing Trump’s latest stunt: a nearly $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund that DOJ says will be used to compensate people who suffered "lawfare" — which, translated from MAGA, means a potential taxpayer-funded payout pipeline for Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump-world martyrs. Cassidy, apparently still dimly aware that laws exist, points out that this looks like the government suing itself, settling with itself, and sending the bill to everyone else.
As a bonus, he’s also not thrilled about the proposed $1 billion to help build Trump’s White House ballroom, because his constituents can’t afford groceries but are somehow expected to underwrite the strongman’s party venue. The man just spent a campaign listening to people worry about gas prices, only to watch his party leaders try to ram through a taxpayer-funded Mar-a-Lago Annex and an insurrectionist restitution fund. So yes, there’s still "room for dissent" in the GOP — it’s just located on the exit ramp.
#killing-democracy#corruption
trumprx: now with 600 more ways to overpay
Trump unveils TrumpRx, a presidential-branded coupon site for drugs that other people already sell cheaper, because why regulate Big Pharma when you can just build a knockoff Expedia for insulin?
Trump announced that his lovingly self-branded prescription drug site, TrumpRx, is adding “over 600 affordable generics” so Americans can enjoy the convenience of navigating a presidential shopping portal to maybe pay more than they would with their own insurance or existing discount programs. According to Trump, this will give people “one source” for the “lowest possible cost” on drugs, which is a bold promise for a site that experts keep pointing out is… not actually the lowest anything.
Airbnb co-founder and now Trump’s chief design officer Joe Gebbia proudly showed off new features like “Presidential Deals” on brand-name drugs and a price-comparison tool, pitching medicine shopping like you’re booking a weekend in Cleveland: compare pills like you compare hotels, Airbnbs, or baseball tickets. Health economists, meanwhile, keep gently screaming into the void that most patients can already get cheaper versions through insurance, pharmacies, or services like Cost Plus Drugs — and that TrumpRx mostly adds confusion to an already byzantine system.
So instead of tackling the pharma lobby, patent games, or PBM abuse, the administration slapped Trump’s name on a website, bolted on a price-comparison widget, and called it reform. The U.S. drug market remains a rigged casino, but now there’s a new table where the house is branded in gold letters and the big innovation is a tab labeled “Presidential Deals”. Truly, American healthcare has never been more on brand.
#forever-grifting#healthcare
president crime-fraud unit deploys to… a printing error
Trump, demanding a DOJ probe into a barcoded envelope system he absolutely does not understand, while the actual printer quietly fixes its mistake like it’s not the collapse of western civilization.
Maryland’s election officials discovered a vendor screwed up and sent some voters the wrong party’s primary ballot. So they did the boring, lawful thing: void the bad ones, send new ones, and explain in detail how their safeguards prevent anyone from voting twice. The printing company is even footing the bill. Democracy functioning like a normal adult system? Obviously this cannot stand.
Trump immediately jumped on Truth Social to scream that Maryland sent out 500,000 “Illegal Mail In Ballots” and demand a Justice Department investigation, because if there’s one thing this guy hates, it’s mail voting that actually works. Election officials calmly laid out how each return envelope has a unique identifier and how only one ballot per voter can be counted; Trump responded by calling Democratic Gov. Wes Moore “corrupt,” because why waste a manufactured scandal if you can’t smear a Black Democratic governor with it.
So we’ve got: a routine administrative fix to a vendor error, fully transparent, no evidence of fraud, and clear safeguards in place — met by a president trying to sic federal law enforcement on a state’s election system to prop up his long-running lie that mail ballots are inherently fraudulent. The printing company made an honest mistake; Trump is using it as fresh kindling for his ongoing project of delegitimizing any election he doesn’t pre-rig in his favor.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
pentagon declares first amendment a 'privilege', demands chaperones
The Pentagon, now offering guided tours of the First Amendment’s funeral.
The Trump Pentagon, now proudly rebranded as the "Department of War" because subtlety is for losers, has decided that reporters may only enter the building with official babysitters. The New York Times just filed its second lawsuit saying this escort-only policy is "utterly unreasonable" and unconstitutional, which is a polite legal way of saying: these people are absolutely trying to suffocate press freedom.
For decades, Pentagon reporters could walk the unsecured corridors, pop into public affairs offices, and talk to more than a dozen officials in a day. Now? To ask a single question, they have to email for an appointment, wait, get an escort, get walked in, ask the question, then get walked back out to a media holding pen like they're on a sixth-grade field trip to the war machine. Then repeat. Over and over. Journalism, but make it DMV.
A federal judge already ruled big chunks of the previous policy unconstitutional and told the Pentagon to knock it off. The Pentagon responded by closing the press workspace, slapping on an "interim" escort rule, and then appealing when the judge said that also violated his order. The appeals court is letting the escort rule stand while this drags on, because apparently the one thing the Trump administration can move quickly on is limiting scrutiny of its Iran war, the capture of Venezuela’s president, and Secretary Pete Hegseth’s spree of firing high-ranking military officials.
The Pentagon’s official line is that press access is merely "a privilege extended by the government"—a bold reinterpretation of the First Amendment that boils down to: we’ll let you cover the world’s largest military when and how we feel like it. The Times calls the policy "patently retaliatory" and "manifestly arbitrary and capricious". The rest of us call it what it is: the executive branch testing how far it can go in turning independent war reporting into a guided tour.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump epa boldly defends americans’ right to drink cancer
Lee Zeldin and RFK Jr unveiling their bold new wellness program: fewer regulations, more carcinogens, same amount of smug.
The Trump EPA has heroically stepped forward to protect the most vulnerable among us: chemical companies. Just two years after Biden’s EPA set the first enforceable drinking water limits in decades for six of the nastiest PFAS "forever chemicals," Administrator Lee Zeldin and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr have announced a plan to kill those limits for four chemicals and stall protections for two more. You may know PFAS as the substances linked to cancer, birth defects, kidney disease, immune problems, and cardiovascular deaths. The Trump team knows them by their scientific name: "campaign donations".
Zeldin and Kennedy claim this is all part of a "Make America Healthy Again" strategy and a new "clean water mandate", which is a bold way of describing "let’s redo the rules until industry is happy and the lawsuits stop making us sad". Biden-era scientists said no level of exposure to some PFAS in drinking water is safe; the Trump EPA’s position appears to be that if you can’t reliably detect the poison, it’s basically wellness. Public health experts, who remain stubbornly opposed to mass involuntary toxicology experiments, note that the Biden rules would have reduced exposure for 100 million people and prevented thousands of deaths. The Trump response is to suggest that the real threat is bureaucratic speed and proper rulemaking.
Kennedy, whose Make America Healthy Again movement is supposedly built on eliminating toxic chemicals from food and water, is now standing at a podium explaining why actually we need to delay eliminating toxic chemicals from water. MAGA and MAHA are reportedly "at odds" over this, which is a polite way of saying the anti-toxin guy just teamed up with the polluters. As one advocate put it, Zeldin and Kennedy are basically selling potions out of the back of a covered wagon; the only difference is that the 19th-century snake oil salesmen didn’t have the power to rewrite federal drinking water standards.
So Trump gets to say he’s fighting toxins while his EPA dismantles the first serious limits on them in a generation, chemical industry insiders at EPA get exactly what they wanted, and up to 200 million Americans get to keep playing PFAS roulette every time they turn on the tap. Make America Healthy Again, one contaminated glass of water at a time.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump’s ‘most pro-life’ president forgets to show up to his own abortion fight
Protesters outside the Supreme Court, still laboring under the quaint belief that the president and his Justice Department might actually defend the federal agency in charge of drug safety.
Republicans are staring down midterms with an unpopular war, inflation, and Trump’s approval ratings sinking like one of his casinos, so naturally the base has chosen this moment to try to yank abortion pills out of the mail. Louisiana is suing the F.D.A. to gut telemedicine and mail access to mifepristone — the main reason abortion is still widely available four years after the fall of Roe. The case has rocketed up to the Supreme Court, bounced around the appeals courts, and for now the justices have restored access while the lawsuit grinds on.
And through all of this, the man who calls himself “the most pro-life president in history” has discovered a bold new legal strategy: hiding under his desk. Trump’s Justice Department — the entity that is literally supposed to defend the F.D.A. — has refused to file a brief at the Supreme Court, which experts describe as "shocking," because it is shocking when the executive branch just declines to defend its own agency in a nationwide health-care case. The administration is essentially winking to the anti-abortion crusaders while avoiding a paper trail that Democrats can wave around in suburban districts.
This is the Trump model in a nutshell: let red states and handpicked judges do the dirty work of stripping rights from millions of women, while the White House pretends to be too busy to notice. It’s not governance, it’s plausible deniability cosplay — using federal power by not using it, and hoping voters blame “the courts” instead of the guy who staffed them and then ordered his DOJ to stand down.
#killing-democracy#pro-life
trump pauses canada defense board over hurt feelings and f‑35 sales pitch
Pentagon officials bravely defending America from the grave Canadian threat of Mark Carney’s Davos PowerPoint.
The Pentagon has decided that the real threat to North American security is not Russia, China, or melting Arctic ice, but Mark Carney saying mean Davos words about "hegemons." Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby announced that the U.S. is "pausing" the Permanent Joint Board on Defense with Canada, because the Canadian prime minister suggested middle powers should maybe not rely on unstable superpowers who throw tantrums on X.
Carney’s big crime? Telling the World Economic Forum that if middle powers aren’t at the table, they’re on the menu. Trump heard that, looked at the menu, and apparently decided to serve North American defense cooperation à la carte. Since then he’s threatened to block a new bridge between Canada and Michigan, while his team quietly dangles the future of NORAD and joint defense in front of Ottawa like a used car salesman shaking the keys to 88 shiny Lockheed Martin F‑35s.
Colby is now publicly scolding Canada for not doing enough on defense spending, while linking to a speech where Carney literally calls for stronger collective security and announcing that they’re "working closely" to push Canada to a 3.5% GDP defense target. Canada, for its part, already hit NATO’s 2% goal early and says it’s on track for 3.5% by 2035, but apparently that’s not enough unless the money is stapled to an F‑35 purchase order and accompanied by a formal apology for hurting Donald Trump’s feelings. Nothing says "serious ally" like holding a 80‑year defense board hostage over a Davos panel and a fighter jet shopping list.
#forever-grifting#national-security#killing-democracy
trump sues himself for $10 billion, then quietly fires the case
Donald Trump, contemplating the legal nuances of suing his own executive branch for $10 billion and then declaring victory when he drops the case.
Donald Trump has decided to voluntarily drop his "unprecedented" $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury over leaked tax records, which legal experts politely described as a constitutional dumpster fire. The case starred Trump, Don Jr., Eric, and the Trump Organization all suing an executive agency that Trump literally controls, then acting shocked when a federal judge asked whether this was an actual legal dispute or just the president trying to turn the federal government into his personal ATM.
The judge, Kathleen M. Williams, had the audacity to wonder whether the Justice Department lawyers defending the government were actually insulated from the guy who runs the Justice Department. Outside legal experts gently suggested the court might want to look into whether there was any "collusion" in settlement talks — because apparently we now need to check if the president is negotiating with himself in good faith. Faced with a Wednesday deadline to explain how this wasn't a separation-of-powers joke, Trump's team suddenly discovered the magic of "voluntary dismissal" and insisted the court no longer needed to weigh in.
So the administration never even answered the lawsuit, the president tried to cash out of his own government over a leak that exposed his finances, and when the judiciary started tugging at the constitutional thread, the whole thing vanished like one of his "infrastructure weeks." Nobody at DOJ, Treasury, the IRS, or the White House rushed to explain any of this, presumably because there's no elegant way to say, "Yes, the president tried to sue his own executive branch for personal gain, and no, we hadn't thought through Article III of the Constitution."
#killing-democracy#corruption
trump solves hurricanes by defunding the forecast
NOAA satellite image of Hurricane Melissa, captured back when the administration still grudgingly funded looking up.
As the US walks into a "super El Niño" summer like it's a surprise party, the Trump administration is helpfully making sure the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has less data to work with. NOAA rolled out advanced AI weather models that need massive, high-quality data to improve forecasts; Trump responded by proposing a 40% cut to NOAA overall, gutting climate programs, and forcing staffing reductions that scale back satellites and weather balloons. Because why just ignore the climate crisis when you can also blindfold the people whose job is to see it coming?
Officials insist there's still a "wealth" of weather data, which is a cute spin when experts are pointing out that critical observation systems, ocean buoys, balloon launches, and climate research are being slashed. The new AI models already struggle with extreme events because they're trained on a past climate that no longer exists, and Trump’s solution is to further starve them of the data they need while also kneecapping the traditional physics-based models that actually handle record-breaking extremes. It’s like ripping out your smoke detectors during wildfire season because you’re tired of bad news.
Scientists are fairly blunt: cutting climate research "arrests our advancement" in forecasting just as record heat, stronger hurricanes, and more chaotic storms line up on the calendar. The administration has essentially decided that if we can’t predict the disaster, maybe voters will just call it "bad luck" instead of policy failure. It’s not weather management, it’s risk laundering — with millions of people in the path of storms that their own government is choosing not to see clearly.
#anti-science#killing-democracy
south carolina gop speedruns jim crow 2.0
South Carolina lawmakers carefully adjusting district lines with the precision of a surgeon and the ethics of a raccoon in a bank vault.
The redistricting circus has rolled into South Carolina, where Republican lawmakers are debating whether to give Donald Trump what he really wants for the 250th birthday of American democracy: a congressional map that converts the state’s lone Democratic seat into yet another safe Republican fiefdom. The timing is perfect, because the Supreme Court just helpfully weakened Voting Rights Act protections for minority districts, and the GOP is racing to squeeze every last drop of disenfranchisement out of that ruling in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and now the Palmetto State.
Veteran Democrat Jim Clyburn, currently the only non-Republican in the state’s seven-member House delegation, says he’s not going anywhere and notes he has addresses in multiple areas: “I live in three districts. I’ll decide which one to run in.” That’s less a flex than a survival strategy when the state government is trying to legally erase Black representation while insisting this has nothing to do with race, voting, or democracy – just a casual effort to turn the clock back to what Clyburn bluntly calls “Jim Crow 2.0”. Early voting for the June primaries starts May 26, while legislators simultaneously try to move House primaries to August, because when you’re gaming the system this hard, the calendar is just another weapon.
Meanwhile, in the broader "Trump Presidency Is Going Great" cinematic universe: a Senate official quietly stripped security funding that could have helped bankroll Trump’s dream of a taxpayer-funded $400m White House ballroom; Trump personally helped primary out GOP senator Bill Cassidy for insufficient devotion; he’s bragging that the Iran war might delay his precious rate cuts; his administration’s rushed patriotic construction projects may be endangering workers; and FBI director Kash Patel is under scrutiny for treating a visit to the USS Arizona like a snorkeling excursion. But sure, let’s keep pretending the real threat to the republic is…school board meetings.
#killing-democracy#racism
trump turns federal regulators into his personal casino pit bosses
Utah state senator Brady Brammer, seen here realizing the federal government is now basically a Trump-branded sportsbook with nuclear weapons.
Utah Republicans have discovered a line even they won’t cross: letting Donald Trump’s federal regulators turn the entire country into a glorified Trump Taj Mahal sportsbook. While Governor Spencer Cox calls prediction markets "gambling – pure and simple" and vows they have "no place in Utah", Trump’s Washington is busy rebranding them as financial innovation, because apparently if you route the bets through the commodities code, it’s not a casino, it’s freedom.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which under Biden tried to clamp down on election and political betting and even saw the FBI raid Polymarket’s founder, has under Trump abruptly decided these platforms are just regular old derivatives exchanges. Totally unrelated, of course, to the fact that Donald Trump Jr now serves as an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket, while the Trump Media & Technology Group is sniffing around launching its own prediction product. The guy who ran casinos now has a son helping steer the regulators’ favorite "not-gambling" casinos, and the federal government is fighting states over who gets to regulate the family’s new side hustle. State sovereignty, meet the House always winning.
#forever-grifting#corruption
maine’s favorite ‘moderate’ keeps helping the arsonist
Susan Collins, seen here contemplating whether this is a day for ‘symbolic opposition’ or reliable pro‑Trump votes.
Susan Collins is back asking Maine for a sixth term, still selling the same beloved brand of performative moderation: sternly worded statements for the cameras, votes for Brett Kavanaugh in the chamber, and photo ops lovingly cradling a MAGA hat in the Oval Office. She voted to convict Trump after January 6 and backed Ketanji Brown Jackson, sure — then turned around and helped him with a national voter‑ID bill and sat on her hands until the last possible second on a war‑powers resolution on Iran, all while Trump’s second term barrels ahead with immigration crackdowns, Medicaid cuts, and a slow-motion demolition of federal agencies.
Enter Graham Platner, a 41‑year‑old marine vet/oysterman whose past racist, sexist, and homophobic posts — plus a now‑covered-up tattoo that looked uncomfortably Nazi‑adjacent — somehow make him the Democratic vehicle for channeling rage at Washington. He calls Collins’s Trump breaks “symbolic opposition” that won’t bring back Roe or reopen hospitals, and accuses her of selling out working‑class Mainers to Trump and the “Epstein class”, which is a hell of a sentence to read about a supposed centrist firewall against authoritarian drift.
Trump, naturally, has spent years telling his followers Collins “should never be elected to office again,” only to pivot to calling her a “good person” once he realizes there’s no harder-right automaton to primary her with. She needs him to shut up; he’s constitutionally incapable of shutting up. So Maine now gets to choose between the veteran architect of conditional resistance — the senator who “shows independence only when her vote is not required” — and an angry outsider with a big boat of baggage, all while the White House uses people’s lives as kindling for its immigration and healthcare agenda. American democracy: still running on vibes and voter suppression bills.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump declares war on insufficiently groveling libertarian
Thomas Massie, moments before learning that in Trump’s GOP, voting with the party 90% of the time still gets you fed to the primary woodchipper.
Donald Trump has decided that Rep. Thomas Massie’s real crime isn’t voting against the "big, beautiful" debt-ballooning tax-and-spend bill or trying to stop strikes on Iran. No, the unforgivable sin was helping force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and occasionally thinking for himself. So the president spent months shopping for a warm body in Kentucky and finally landed on Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL whose chief qualification is being "100% behind the president" and 0% interested in debating.
The result: the most expensive House primary in U.S. history, with more than $32 million in ad spending, mostly from Trump-aligned and pro-Israel groups trying to carpet-bomb one of the only Republicans who still pretends the national debt and endless war are bad. Massie’s reward for voting with the party 90% of the time is being labeled a "pathetic LOSER," a "sick Wacko," and a traitor to the cult — sorry, "Republican Party" — in a district Trump won by a landslide.
Meanwhile, GOP leadership does its usual profile-in-courage routine. Speaker Mike Johnson shrugs from the sidelines, happy to maybe replace a pain-in-the-ass libertarian with a more reliable rubber stamp for Trump’s agenda. Rand Paul, Lauren Boebert, and a few others murmur support for Massie while carefully reassuring everyone they still "like" Trump, as if the problem here is a minor disagreement between friends and not a sitting president using his office to purge anyone who deviates even 10% from the party line.
Massie calls the race a referendum on the future of the GOP: younger voters who don’t want to die in another war versus older "Fox News demographic" voters who just want to vote for whoever Trump points at. The president, naturally, is betting that fear, cash, and blind loyalty will beat policy, independence, and basic democratic norms.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump orders, polis delivers: election denier early-bird special
Tina Peters, seen here workshopping new ways to "protect" elections by breaking them, warms up the crowd at a 2022 Trump rally.
President Trump picked up the phone last fall and delivered his usual subtle, policy-focused message to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis: free Tina Peters. Peters, the former Mesa County clerk who helped tamper with election equipment to "prove" Trump’s lies about 2020, was sitting on a nine-year sentence. Trump wanted his election-denying martyr out, and, shockingly, the guy who has spent years insisting elections are rigged suddenly cared deeply about the fate of someone convicted for actually undermining them.
Polis publicly told Trump he wouldn’t pardon Peters — bold stand, very brave — and then quietly spent months in a political pressure cooker as the White House turned the screws. Federal cuts rained down on Colorado like budgetary tear gas while Democrats begged Polis not to fold to the orange extortionist-in-chief. On Friday, after all that principled resistance, Polis split the tiniest possible hair: no pardon, just a commutation. Peters’s nine-year sentence got chopped so she can stroll out on parole after serving less than two years.
So now, as Trump stuffs the federal government with fellow election deniers and wages a coast-to-coast war over redistricting, one of the movement’s convicted foot soldiers is getting an early release courtesy of a Democratic governor who found a way to technically keep his promise while practically giving Trump exactly what he wanted. The message to future would-be saboteurs of American democracy is clear: do the crime, help the right autocrat, and eventually some blue-state technocrat will find a "nuanced" way to open the door.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s national mall tent revival state
The National Mall, now available in three classic styles: protest, inauguration, and soft-launch theocracy.
Washington, DC spent Sunday cosplaying as a soft-launch theocracy, as thousands packed the National Mall for a White House–blessed prayer rally to "rededicate" America as One Nation Under God—specifically, their very particular, very Republican God. The stage looked like a mashup of a megachurch and a federal courthouse, complete with stained-glass founders and a big white cross, because nothing says "healthy constitutional republic" like turning your civic space into a themed worship park.
The speaker list read like a who’s-who of Trump-era Christian nationalism: Paula White-Cain from the White House faith office, Franklin Graham, Pastor Samuel "America is done with God" Rodriguez, and a token Orthodox rabbi to keep the brochure looking diverse. Senator Tim Scott worked the crowd with "Are you a believer in Jesus?"—a neat little litmus test to hear from someone whose job description allegedly covers all Americans, including the more than one-quarter who are atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Speaker Mike Johnson, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth all lined up to lend the full weight of the federal government to a rally that functionally declares the Establishment Clause optional.
Critics like Rev. Adam Russell Taylor pointed out that this was less "religious freedom" and more a public dedication of the state to a narrow, hard-right brand of Christianity. But the administration clearly prefers the Valley Forge fan fiction Hegseth invoked—George Washington "praying without ceasing"—to the actual Constitution, which says nothing about mandatory national prayer days and quite a lot about not turning the government into a church youth group with nukes. Rededicate 250 looks a lot less like a birthday party for American independence and a lot more like a dress rehearsal for a Christian nationalist state.
#killing-democracy#fascism
