civil rights icon dies, trump immediately makes it about trump
Jesse Jackson spent a lifetime fighting for civil rights; Trump spent a post about Jesse Jackson fighting for civil Trump.
Most political leaders responded to Jesse Jackson’s death by doing the normal human thing: honoring an 84-year-old civil rights titan who spent decades pushing America slightly closer to the democracy it keeps bragging about being. Kamala Harris, Raphael Warnock, Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, and Bernice King all used their posts to talk about Jackson’s work, his moral leadership, his Rainbow Coalition, and his stubborn insistence that poor and marginalized people are actually human beings.
Then Donald Trump logged on.
On Truth Social, the president solemnly remembered Jackson as “a good man” and “a friend” before sprinting straight into his favorite topic: himself. Within a couple of sentences, the tribute had morphed into a grievance rant about “scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left” who “falsely” call him racist, a demand for credit for funding HBCUs that Jackson "loved," and a petty shot at Barack Obama, whom Trump claims Jackson “could not stand.” The civil rights leader is barely cold and Trump is already using him as a prop in his ongoing persecution cosplay, turning a eulogy into a campaign ad for his own victimhood.
So while everyone else is talking about justice, sacrifice, and expanding democracy, Trump is over in the corner live‑blogging his emotional needs and retrofitting Jackson’s legacy into a MAGA character witness. It’s less a tribute than a hostage note: tell them I’m not racist, Jesse.
#leopards-ate-my-face#racism
fbi to minnesota: trust us, the secret shootings were totally fine
Local resident scans the street for federal agents, because under Trump that’s now just part of the neighborhood watch program.
While the country mourns Rev Jesse Jackson – a man who spent his life trying to make America less racist and less violent – Trump’s immigration goon squad is out in Minneapolis allegedly treating city streets like a live-fire training exercise. Customs and Border Protection officers have shot and killed three people in about two weeks, including Alex Pretti, and now the FBI has decided that the public’s right to know is classified. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension politely asked for evidence, and the feds responded with the transparency of a brick wall.
Instead of cooperating with state investigators, the FBI has formally told Minnesota that information and evidence about the Pretti shooting will not be shared. So we’ve arrived at the stage where Trump’s federal enforcers kill people in a U.S. city and then tell local authorities: you don’t get to see what we did, just trust the same system that keeps clearing itself. Governor Tim Walz summed it up: “Trump’s left hand cannot investigate his right hand” – though given this administration’s record, it’s less left vs right and more trigger finger vs everyone else.
All of this is happening under the nostalgic gaze of an America that once produced leaders like Jesse Jackson, who literally risked his life confronting state violence, while today’s White House treats unaccountable armed agents as a campaign accessory. The contrast is almost poetic: a civil rights icon dies at 84, and the federal government honors his legacy by making sure no one can even investigate why people keep getting shot by immigration cops in the middle of Minneapolis. Truly, the dream lives on – just heavily redacted.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#fascism
trump turns amazon warehouses into human storage units
ICE’s new state-of-the-art facility, where the only thing treated like a person is the barcode.
The Trump administration has decided that if America is going to have concentration camps, they might as well be efficient. ICE, now flush with a $45bn "big, beautiful" congressional allowance, is on a nationwide shopping spree for mega‑warehouses: $70m in Surprise, Arizona; $37m in San Antonio; $87.4m in Berks County, Pennsylvania; $102m in Williamsport, Maryland. These are cavernous industrial spaces designed for pallets and forklifts, not human beings, but Todd Lyons — the ICE director who cheerfully described his deportation machine as "like Amazon Prime, for human beings" — seems determined to prove that you really can deliver misery at scale.
This is not a system being "built" so much as upgraded. ICE already cages roughly 70,000 people a night across 224 facilities, many in conditions so squalid that a detainee in Otay Mesa had to smuggle out a note tied to a lotion bottle to describe it: no fruit for 290 days, one giant windowless room, constant illness, no grass or trees, freezing cold. Fort Bliss, the Everglades "Alligator Alcatraz" tent city, Krome in Miami, Dilley in Texas — it's a tour of American shame, complete with children held in disease‑ridden, degrading conditions while the administration swears everything meets "national detention standards" that apparently were drafted by a particularly sadistic landlord.
Naturally, none of this can withstand sunlight. DHS and ICE have simply started refusing members of Congress access to facilities — in direct violation of the law — and are even going to court to stop legal inspections. When an agency is willing to openly defy the legislative branch just to keep people from seeing the inside of its camps, it’s not "border security" anymore; it’s a sprawling, unaccountable carceral empire. Merriam‑Webster defines a concentration camp as the mass detention of people, often minorities or refugees, under armed guard. ICE has read the definition, nodded enthusiastically, and then asked for more square footage and better loading docks.
The only flicker of sanity comes from the communities stuck hosting these monuments to cruelty. Locals in places like Maryland and Pennsylvania are packing town halls, marching in the streets, and begging officials to stop their neighborhoods from becoming the next node in Trump’s detention archipelago. While Chris Van Hollen and other Democrats show up to rallies and issue sternly worded objections, ICE keeps signing checks and pouring concrete. The administration is busy turning the logistics model that gets you two‑day shipping on dog food into a nationwide system for rapidly processing, warehousing, and breaking human beings — and the question isn't whether history will judge it harshly, but how many people it will chew up before anyone actually stops it.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy#fascism
trump ‘frees’ wall street by locking retirees in a financial prison
Trump signs an executive order to ‘democratize’ Wall Street’s access to your retirement account, surrounded by men who definitely won’t be there when your 401(k) turns into kindling.
Donald Trump has discovered a bold new way to "help" ordinary Americans retire: turn their 401(k)s into a casino and let Wall Street run the tables. His 2025 executive order, cheerfully titled "Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors", is Washington-speak for opening up $14tn in retirement savings so private equity, hedge funds, and other fee vampires can suck on it directly. Why should only billionaires get fleeced by complex, opaque products when teachers and bank tellers can join the fun?
If that weren’t generous enough, Trump then commuted the sentence of David Gentile, the ex-CEO of GPB Capital Holdings, who helped orchestrate a $1.6bn alternative-investments fraud that nuked the savings of thousands of small investors. So on one hand, the administration is working overtime to funnel "mom and pop" into the same risky alt-products that already blew up retirees’ lives. On the other, it’s literally springing from prison the guy whose scheme is Exhibit A in why these products should be nowhere near regular people’s nest eggs. Regulatory policy meets loyalty program for financial criminals.
The White House insists this is all about “expanding optionality for retail investors,” which is a fancy way of saying: you’re free to choose between losing your money slowly to inflation or quickly to structured notes and leveraged ETFs you don’t understand. While 92% of retirees panic about their savings being eaten alive by rising prices, Trump’s Wall Street friends are circling that fear like sharks around a bleeding swimmer, selling "inflation hedges" and "private market access" that come with high fees, massive downside, and glossy brochures. It’s not investor protection; it’s a retirement harvest.
#forever-grifting#money
operation catch of the (brown) day
Brave federal agents heroically confront Maine’s greatest threat: people going to work and taking care of their kids in public.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security looked at Maine — a state with labor shortages, aging demographics, and communities that actually want immigrants — and said: what if we sent masked, heavily armed agents into its most diverse cities and called it Operation Catch of the Day? Because when you’re doing a legally and morally grotesque dragnet, you might as well slap a dad joke on it. Officially, DHS swore they were going after “the worst of the worst.” In reality, videos and eyewitnesses show them sweeping up a Colombian civil engineer with a work permit, asylum-seekers legally working at county jails, and shattering a car window so a one-month-old baby could be showered in glass while they grabbed his father, who has no criminal record.
All of this just happens to kick off weeks before vulnerable Republican Sen. Susan Collins — the eternal queen of being "concerned" right before voting for it — is up for reelection in a state that didn’t vote for Trump. Now the immigration crackdown is the defining issue in the race, with terrified immigrant communities on one side and a White House happy to turn federal law enforcement into campaign muscle on the other. The message from Trump’s America is clear: no matter how legal your status, how essential your job, or how tiny your baby, you’re one convenient photo-op away from becoming collateral damage in the reelection strategy.
So Maine gets militarized ICE raids, broken windows, and traumatized families, while Collins gets to pretend she’s just an innocent bystander to the administration she keeps enabling. DHS calls it enforcement. The campaign calls it a wedge issue. Anyone with a conscience would call it what it is: state-sponsored harassment of immigrants, dressed up as public safety and served with a side of lobster-themed branding.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump quits the who again, still uses their homework
Trump announces America is done with the World Health Organization, shortly before staffers email the WHO asking for the latest H5N1 situation report like nothing happened.
Donald Trump has officially yanked the U.S. out of the World Health Organization for the second time, because nothing says America First like sabotaging the very global health system your own government quietly keeps using. Publicly, Trump is ranting Farage-style about a tyrannical WHO that supposedly forced lockdowns and stole everyone’s freedoms; privately, his team is still on the phone with Geneva asking for disease intel like a teenager who "ran away from home" but keeps coming back to do laundry.
The supposed big scandal is that the WHO isn’t politically obedient enough. It refused to launder MAGA talking points about vaccines causing autism, paracetamol in pregnancy causing autism, and climate change being fake, and it also pushed back on pressure from Israel over Gaza and from Russia over Ukraine. So the Trump response is to punish the organization the U.S. literally helped build, after decades of bipartisan American leadership on smallpox, polio, HIV/Aids, Ebola, and child mortality. Now, U.S. academics are too scared to talk on the record about any of this because their funding and jobs are on the line. Freedom!
The punchline: the WHO has already reformed its financing and locked in about 85% of its budget for 2026–27, while the U.S. creates a leadership vacuum that the EU, China, and Russia are all rushing to fill. Trump gets his domestic propaganda win, Farage gets a talking point, and the rest of the world gets to watch the former global health leader cosplay as a sovereign loner while still sneaking back to the multilateral table for crucial data. Publicly screaming "we don’t need you" while privately begging for help is less a strategy than a cry for attention, but it does perfectly summarize Trump’s foreign policy.
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
trump threatens iran with b‑2 diplomacy
Iran’s negotiator meets the IAEA chief while somewhere offstage Trump’s B‑2s wait to offer their own unique contribution to diplomacy.
U.S. and Iranian negotiators in Geneva say they’ve agreed on some "guiding principles" for a nuclear deal, which is diplomatic code for: we’ve written the table of contents and everyone’s already threatening to flip the table. Iran’s Abbas Araghchi cautiously talks of progress and draft texts, while Washington’s official position is complete silence because the guy in charge of the U.S. delegation is casino developer / Trump pal Steve Witkoff, assisted by son‑in‑law emeritus Jared Kushner. So yes, the fate of nuclear nonproliferation is now being workshopped by the Mar‑a‑Lago extended universe.
While Iran’s foreign ministry keeps repeating there’s "no trust" between the two sides, Trump is helpfully reinforcing that by boasting from Air Force One that the U.S. already joined Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear facilities and has B‑2 bombers ready to "knock out their nuclear potential." He frames the talks as Iran’s last chance before more airstrikes, casually describing weeks of possible operations like he’s ordering the deluxe package at a golf resort. Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei warns that even the "world’s strongest" army can be slapped down, the Revolutionary Guards run drills in the Strait of Hormuz, and the global oil market stares into the abyss.
All of this is layered on top of Iran’s deadly crackdown on protests that have already cost thousands of lives, a crisis helpfully intensified by the same sanctions Trump is using as a bargaining chip. Washington wants to expand talks to missiles and regional power; Tehran says it will only bargain over nukes for sanctions relief and isn’t touching its missile program. So the Trump White House is essentially running a high‑stakes, nuclear‑adjacent hostage negotiation with a regime under massive internal pressure, using military escalation and regime‑change rhetoric as tools of statecraft. What could possibly go wrong when you replace arms control experts with real estate guys and bombers?
#imperialism#national-security#killing-democracy
trump calls obeying illegal orders 'patriotic', labels obeying the law 'sedition'
Mark Kelly, one of the last people in Washington who has literally been to space, contemplating a run for president because apparently someone has to explain to the commander-in-chief that 'illegal order' is not a suggestion.
Senator Mark Kelly, former astronaut and current endangered species known as "engineer who can read," tells the BBC he’ll “seriously consider” running for president in 2028 — mostly because the Trump administration is currently trying to criminalize the radical idea that the military shouldn’t follow illegal orders. Kelly and five other lawmakers with military or intel backgrounds put out a 90-second video reminding troops they have a duty to refuse unlawful commands. The White House responded like any healthy democracy would: by branding it "seditious behaviour" and unleashing the government at them.
Since Trump publicly targeted him over the video, Kelly and his wife Gabrielle Giffords now get death threats on a “weekly” basis and require 24/7 security. The senator says he expects Trump to keep pushing his legal crusade all the way to the Supreme Court, because nothing screams "law and order" like punishing people for telling soldiers to follow the law. Critics, also known as "people who’ve read the First Amendment," are calling the crackdown what it is: a frontal assault on free speech and another entry in Trump’s long-running series, “Using the State to Punish My Enemies.”
Hovering over all this is the 2028 sequel casting call. On the Democratic side, Kelly joins Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom in the "maybe I’ll try to put the fire out" lane. Trump, meanwhile, is already workshopping heirs to the throne — JD Vance and Marco Rubio, whom he describes as "unstoppable," presumably in the same way a runaway train is unstoppable once someone’s ripped out the brakes. The message from this administration is clear: obeying illegal orders is patriotic, questioning them is sedition, and anyone who disagrees can see you in court or in the crosshairs of the president’s fan club.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump turns independence hall into the ministry of truth, loses
National Park Service staff reverse-engineering an exhibit after the White House tried to speedrun the Ministry of Truth storyline.
The Trump administration tried a bold new approach to American history: if the past makes you look bad, just rip it out of the ground. The National Park Service quietly dismantled a long-standing slavery exhibit at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park — the site of George Washington’s presidential residence — because Trump has decided that acknowledging slavery is "anti-American ideology." Naturally, the city of Philadelphia responded by doing the most un-Trump thing imaginable: using the law.
Federal judge Cynthia Rufe — a George W Bush appointee, because reality still has a sense of humor — opened her opinion by quoting 1984 and then directly likened Trump’s crew to the Ministry of Truth. She spelled out the administration’s claim: that the federal government can "dissemble and disassemble historical truths" whenever it controls the property. Her answer: "It does not." Translation: no, you cannot just memory-hole slavery because it’s messing up your campaign merch aesthetic.
Rufe ordered the National Park Service to restore the President’s House site to how it looked on January 21, 2026, i.e., before the Ministry of Truth cosplay. She also took the time to remind everyone why the exhibit exists: historians uncovered the first presidential residence and the stories of nine enslaved Africans owned by Washington, whose names are literally etched into the wall — Oney Judge, Austin, Christopher Sheels, Giles, Hercules Posey, Joe Richardson, Moll, Paris, and Richmond. Some, like Oney Judge and Hercules, escaped. The Trump administration’s big idea was to escape them from history.
So the courts are now in the position of having to explain to the federal government that you can’t legally erase slavery from a museum at Independence Hall to soothe the feelings of a man who thinks the real victims of American history are Confederate statues. The good news: the exhibit is coming back. The bad news: we now need federal injunctions to stop the president from editing the past like a Truth Social post.
#fascism#killing-democracy
trump heroically orders broke fema to fix the poop river
Raw sewage is diverted away from the Potomac River, which is also how Republicans describe their approach to FEMA funding.
Donald Trump has boldly stepped up to the Potomac sewage disaster by ordering FEMA to take charge of the response — a touching gesture, given that FEMA currently has all the operational capacity of a maxed-out credit card. FEMA’s funding is frozen because DHS ran out of money last week, thanks to a Republican–Democratic standoff where Democrats want changes to ICE, and the GOP would apparently rather let millions of gallons of wastewater gush into a major river than touch their sacred deportation machine.
Trump blasted Democratic leaders for turning the Potomac into a "Disaster Zone" and accused Maryland Governor Wes Moore of "gross mismanagement," which is an interesting take considering the busted sewer line is managed by DC Water and thus falls under federal responsibility. The Maryland governor’s office gently noted that the president has his facts wrong again, and that the Trump administration has spent four weeks doing absolutely nothing while E. coli and MRSA levels spike and officials tell residents to stay away from the river.
So to recap: Trump waited a month, ignored the problem, helped preside over a funding freeze that kneecapped the very agency he’s now theatrically "putting in charge," and then blamed Democrats for the mess. It’s the Trump governance model in one neat package: cause crisis, defund response, scream on social media, demand credit — while the capital’s river turns into a bacteria smoothie.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
republicans discover ‘low-hanging fruit’ is just federal workers’ paychecks
Rep. Don Bacon explains that the easiest way to govern is to break the government first and negotiate over the wreckage.
Rep. Don Bacon pops up on Meet the Press to explain that the way out of the Trump-induced DHS shutdown is for Congress to find "low-hanging fruit" on DHS reforms — a bold way of saying, "what if we only partially dismantle the agency we just defunded?" While Trump demands sweeping immigration crackdowns and structural changes as ransom for reopening the government, Bacon is out here pitching starter authoritarianism: maybe just a few reforms, a little more border theater, and then we’ll consider letting DHS function again.
The framing, of course, is that this is all normal negotiation, not the president and his party holding national security, federal workers’ paychecks, and basic governance hostage for campaign talking points. DHS isn’t being reformed through hearings, oversight, or legislation; it’s being reengineered at gunpoint via shutdown brinkmanship. That’s not policymaking, it’s governance-by-extortion.
What Bacon sells as "low-hanging fruit" is really the bipartisan normalization of Trump’s strategy: shut it down, blame the other side, then demand structural concessions just to turn the lights back on. It’s a handy precedent for any future president who wants to bypass Congress and treat the federal workforce as disposable collateral. Democracy: now available only after you meet the president’s demands.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#trumps-america
gateway to trump’s ego, closed for construction
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s vision for Penn Station: same delays, same crumbling tunnels, 400% more gold letters spelling his name.
The president who bankrupted casinos is now lecturing New York and New Jersey about fiscal responsibility, announcing that the federal government won’t pay a single dollar of cost overruns for the long-delayed Gateway tunnel project. This comes just days after a federal judge had to step in and block his administration from withholding money for the $16 billion tunnel in the first place. Normal presidents use infrastructure to create jobs and modernize transit; Donald Trump uses it the way he uses everything else: as leverage for personal branding and revenge.
NBC News previously reported that Trump’s team told Chuck Schumer that maybe, just maybe, the money could flow if Penn Station in New York and Dulles Airport in Virginia were renamed after Trump. Today, Trump insists the idea was totally not his, merely something floated by “certain politicians and construction union heads,” because when you think union guys, you definitely think: let’s name the train station after the guy who tried to kill our pensions. The White House line is now that the tunnel could be “financially catastrophic” — unlike, say, holding a multi-state transportation network hostage to the president’s fragile ego.
The petty doesn’t stop at naming rights. Last fall, budget director and professional culture warrior Russell Vought proudly froze funding for the project, claiming the money might be tainted by “unconstitutional DEI principles.” On the same day, he slashed billions more from infrastructure in states that Kamala Harris carried in 2024, because nothing says “serious stewardship of taxpayer dollars” like turning the federal budget into a loyalty rewards program. Infrastructure in blue states is being treated as a luxury item, subject to cancellation whenever Trump needs a new vendetta or a fresh surface to slap his name on.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
white house comms shop now fully bilingual in english and white nationalism
Trump, on his way to Marine One, presumably brainstorming which white nationalist meme to accidentally post from his account next while the flag in the background dies a little inside.
The Trump White House briefly remembered there’s still such a thing as shame and deleted a Truth Social post from Trump’s account that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The official explanation: an aide did it. Of course. The president just accidentally keeps hiring staffers whose hobbies line up perfectly with Stormfront memes. Barack Obama called it "deeply troubling," which is a very polite way of saying, "this is straight-up racist garbage from the Oval Office."
The real fun, as civil rights experts point out, is that this wasn’t a one-off; it’s just the loudest part of a year-long pattern where federal agencies have been marinating their public messaging in the aesthetics of white nationalism. DHS, apparently bored with mere incompetence, has gone full propaganda lab, pumping out recruitment materials drenched in nostalgic white Americana and "defend the homeland" language that tracks almost word-for-word with decades of extremist, anti-immigrant screeds about a "migrant invasion" from the Global South.
Asked about all this, DHS and the White House responded with the subtlety of a Fox News chyron, accusing NPR of "manufacturing outrage" and calling questions about extremist themes "bizarre" and "leftwing advocacy." Scholars call it what it is: plausible deniability as policy. The government’s new communications strategy is simple — speak in the emotional language of white nationalism, then act shocked anyone noticed. Dog whistles are only for dogs, after all; why are the humans suddenly hearing them?
#fascism#racism
trump scares uk so much they’re building backup money
British bankers gather to ask a simple question: what if the world’s reserve currency is run by a guy who rage-posts at 3am?
UK bank bosses are quietly holding a "what if Trump turns off our money" emergency meeting, which is not ominous at all. With Trump threatening Nato allies over Greenland like a wannabe Bond villain with worse speeches, British banks have decided that maybe, just maybe, having 95% of card payments run through two US companies that a vindictive president could pressure is not the pinnacle of national security. So they’re building a domestic backup payments system, because the free world now plans around the possibility that the American president might unplug their economy for fun and foreign policy.
Rather than say the quiet part out loud, UK officials mumble about "cyber and operational risk" while European politicians openly warn that "Trump can cut everything off" and demand an "Airbus for payment systems." The punchline: Visa and Mastercard are being invited to help design the alternative to Visa and Mastercard, like putting the arsonist on the fire safety committee. Still, when your closest allies start engineering a financial escape pod in case Washington elects the chaos goblin again, that’s not just market innovation – that’s a global vote of no confidence in America’s ability to restrain its own would‑be autocrat.
So by 2030, the UK hopes to have DeliveryCo, a shiny new payments rail whose main design spec is: "works even if the US goes full Trump again." This is what "leader of the free world" looks like now: NATO countries scrambling to build parallel financial systems so they don’t get caught in the blast radius of the next tantrum in the Oval Office.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump republican buys epstein’s desert of bad decisions
Zorro Ranch, seen here trying very hard to look like a normal luxury property and not a 10,000-acre monument to everyone in power pretending they saw nothing.
Texas "Trump Republican" and aspiring comptroller Don Huffines turns out to be the proud political face of a family that quietly snapped up Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous New Mexico Zorro Ranch — the 10,000-acre sex-trafficking crime scene that came with more red flags than a CPAC stage. They bought it in 2023 through a nice, anonymous-friendly LLC, because nothing says "trust me with state finances" like hiding your ownership of a convicted predator’s playground behind shell paperwork.
His spokesperson insists the Huffines clan only swooped in four years after Epstein’s death, purely to help victims via the auction proceeds, and definitely not because they thought they could get a bargain on a disgraced billionaire’s lair. They even complained the place was overvalued due to its “notoriety”, and got the county to knock the assessed value down from $21.1m to $13.4m. Apparently the market just doesn’t properly appreciate the resale challenges of a property that doubled as the set for Epstein’s eugenics fanfic.
Meanwhile, Huffines is the GOP frontrunner for Texas comptroller, running on a promise to "DOGE Texas government" — a loving tribute to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the federal demolition crew that fired people first and asked zero questions later. He brands himself a "successful businessman" and "Trump Republican" endorsed by Ted Cruz, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron Paul, and assorted culture-war influencers, while the Trump administration tries desperately to pretend the Epstein files — where Trump’s name shows up thousands of times and includes a sexually suggestive birthday note — are just a boring paperwork issue and not a giant neon sign about the company this movement keeps.
The campaign won’t say what the family actually plans to do with the ranch, but given Epstein once allegedly envisioned it as a base for spreading his DNA, it’s on-brand that the MAGA era has converted it into a real-estate asset for a Trump-branded candidate. From sex-trafficker’s compound to "Texas-first" balance-sheet opportunity — the free market works, folks.
#corruption#forever-grifting
america first, ohio last
John Paulson practices his love of American manufacturing by seeing how many American manufacturers he can stop manufacturing.
Hedge fund billionaire and Trump mega-donor John Paulson — the guy who got rich betting on the 2008 housing collapse and then somehow became an economic guru in Trumpworld — is closing a Conn Selmer factory in East Lake, Ohio, and shipping the work to China. That’s 150 union jobs gone so that a man who once raised $50.5m for Trump in a single Palm Beach evening can "improve competitiveness" and "meet market demands" — billionaire for "we found cheaper labor and don’t care if your town dies".
This is the same Paulson who went on CNBC in 2024 to thunder that "we can’t have American producers closing American factories and offshoring" while praising Trump’s tariffs and vowing to protect American manufacturing. Now his company tells the union there will be no bargaining because the plant is closing, after quietly opening a facility in China and siphoning work out of Ohio — while feeding workers reassurances that the new plant wouldn’t affect them. Shockingly, the brass parts coming back from China are low quality, but the corporate PowerPoint says the real problem is the American workers.
Employees call it a slap in the face; Paulson calls it Tuesday. The workers rally, release videos about betrayal and heartbreak, and beg the same Trump who made Paulson part of his economic policy brain trust to step in and save them. The White House responds with the full force of America First compassion by… not returning calls, just like the company. Meanwhile, Conn Selmer insists it remains "deeply committed" to US manufacturing — a bold claim for a firm that just told 150 Americans their livelihoods are a rounding error on John Paulson’s next yacht upgrade.
#forever-grifting#money
slumlord peace: kushner to fix ukraine between real estate deals
Zelenskyy listening politely as Jared Kushner explains Eastern Europe using the same expertise that once gave us “We’ll fix everything with an Abraham Accord and some condos.”
The Trump administration has decided that four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the perfect moment to roll out its discount diplomacy package: send Jared Kushner and Trump mega-donor Steve Witkoff to Switzerland and call it “peace talks.” Because when you’re dealing with the largest land war in Europe since WWII, naturally you tap the guy who couldn’t even get Middle East peace without a map that looked like a WeWork floor plan.
Trump is publicly leaning on Volodymyr Zelenskyy to “act” because “Russia wants to make a deal,” which is a poetic way of saying give up your land and trust the guy who invaded you four times. Meanwhile, his own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is out in Munich gently hinting that Moscow might not be all that serious about peace. So the official US position is: Russia is totally ready for a grand bargain, unless you ask literally anyone at State who can read a casualty report.
Ukraine, annoyingly for the Kremlin and Mar-a-Lago, is refusing to hand over the Donbas like it’s a golf course Trump lost in bankruptcy court. Zelenskyy points out that letting Putin keep stolen territory hasn’t worked out so great in Chechnya, Georgia, or Crimea, and that “Putin cannot be stopped with kisses or flowers” — a surprisingly concise review of the entire early-2000s western Russia policy. Washington, for its part, is trying to sell Kyiv on 15 years of US security guarantees while Ukraine, having watched America’s attention span, is asking for 30-50. One side is living in reality; the other is scheduling side meetings with Iran between press hits.
So Geneva will host another round of “talks” where Russia sends an adviser who denies Ukraine is real, the US sends a landlord and a legacy admission, and Ukraine sends people who are actually fighting a war. The Trump team calls it diplomacy; everyone else recognizes it as a live demonstration of how to pressure a democratic ally to swallow a bad deal so your president can brag about a “historic peace” on Truth Social before heading back to the buffet.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
great news: airport security is now a volunteer position
Pictured: the frontline of national security, now operating on vibes and overdue bills.
Welcome to the latest episode of "America, But Make It Feudal," where TSA agents are still required to show up, screen thousands of passengers, and protect national security — just without the unnecessary luxury of money. Because nothing says "world's most advanced democracy" like forcing people to work while their paychecks are held hostage by a political feud over DHS funding.
This partial government shutdown means the people rummaging through your bags and stopping you from accidentally packing a loaded gun in your carry-on are effectively unpaid interns for the Homeland. Miss a shift? You’re disciplined. Show up? You get the warm satisfaction of knowing your landlord definitely won’t accept "patriotic service" as rent. It’s illegal to not work, but perfectly fine for the government not to pay you yet — a fun little arrangement that would be called "forced labor" if any other country tried it.
Meanwhile, the same crowd screaming about "border security" is totally fine kneecapping the very department that handles, you know, security. Flights keep running on the backs of stressed, underpaid, now-unpaid workers, while the political class treats their livelihoods like poker chips in another shutdown stunt. We get slower lines, higher security risks, and a federal workforce learning that their employer will absolutely use them as leverage. Truly, the shutdown is going great.
#killing-democracy#money#forever-grifting
trumprx: coupons, culture war, and not much medicine
TrumpRx: because nothing says ‘universal IVF access’ like a discount code for 10% of the bill and a lecture from the Heritage Foundation.
Trump’s long-hyped miracle drug-discount program, TrumpRx, has finally launched and, shockingly, it’s mostly a glorified coupon site with 43 meds and the policy depth of a CVS receipt. The only drugs that actually get cheaper in any meaningful way are GLP‑1s for weight loss and a handful of fertility meds, giving Trump just enough IVF content to wave around and claim he delivered on his 2024 promise of “universal” IVF access. The catch? Those fertility coupons cover maybe 10–20% of IVF costs, in a world where a single cycle can run up to $30,000 and patients are told to budget for as many as four. It’s like promising everyone a house and then handing out Home Depot coupons for doorknobs.
The whole thing is wrapped in the usual second-term theological hostage situation. The Heritage Foundation — the same crew behind Project 2025 and other "America, but less democracy" ideas — considers embryos "sacred human beings" and treats IVF as morally suspect because not every embryo survives. That absolutist fertilized-egg-as-baby fiction boxes the administration into a corner: Trump wants credit for being the pro‑IVF guy after Dobbs backlash, while his ideological babysitters insist that modern reproductive medicine is a crime scene. So we get this half-step: some IVF-adjacent discounts, a little pandering to would-be parents, and zero serious policy to actually make treatment accessible.
To pad out the charade, TrumpRx quietly leans on fuzzy, Heritage-approved buzzwords like “restorative reproductive medicine” — a pseudo-medical framing that implies infertility isn’t a disease but a moral or lifestyle glitch you can fix if you just live right. It’s the same Make America Healthy Again logic that says diet and vibes can cure chronic illness, now repurposed for fertility: if you just fix the “underlying problems” (and, ideally, are a married heterosexual couple), the state might grudgingly tolerate your attempts to have a child. Meanwhile, the health department won’t even comment, clinics still charge luxury-car prices per cycle, and Americans are left with a government website that functions less as healthcare reform and more as a culture-war landing page with printable coupons.
#pro-life#killing-democracy
trump’s protection racket foreign policy goes global
NATO, now rebranded as ‘We Swear We’ll Pay, Please Don’t Leave Alliance,’ poses in front of a giant Trump headshot.
Europe is suddenly hanging billboards for drones on churches because Donald Trump has turned transatlantic security into a live-action remake of The Sopranos, except somehow dumber and with worse tailoring. With the US freezing new aid to Ukraine and Trump treating NATO like a gym membership he never intended to pay for, Germany is now the biggest single donor to Kyiv and is racing to build a war economy it thought it left behind in the 20th century.
At the Munich Security Conference, European leaders are basically holding a group therapy session about how their "former best pal" in Washington keeps threatening to walk out of NATO unless they pay tribute and applaud loudly enough. Trump officials "appreciate" Europe’s sudden €150bn defence splurge the way an arsonist appreciates how quickly the fire department shows up. The new world order is simple: America’s security guarantees are for sale, rule of law is optional, and the free world is advised to keep three to ten days of canned goods on hand, just in case the President’s next tantrum is strategic.
#killing-democracy#national-security#imperialism
