The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration is very bravely warning Europe to step up Ebola screening ahead of the World Cup, like a guy flicking lit matches around a gas station and then yelling at everyone else about fire safety. State Department cables reviewed by NBC News show U.S. diplomats being told to pressure European governments to copy America’s travel restrictions or face unspecified "unilateral measures" — always reassuring language from an administration that treats diplomacy like a protection racket.

There’s a tiny catch: global health officials say the Ebola outbreak is outpacing the international response in part because the U.S. pulled out of the World Health Organization, shuttered USAID, and slashed funding for disease surveillance networks that might have caught this sooner. So after kneecapping the very systems designed to stop this kind of thing, Team Trump now gets to strut around talking about "the highest standards of national security and public health" while scrambling to build quarantine centers in Kenya and screening hubs at U.S. airports. It’s disaster management as performance art: create the hole, then demand applause for bringing a slightly bigger bucket.

As Congo — which actually qualified for the World Cup — deals with a severe Bundibugyo strain of Ebola with no vaccine and no treatment, the U.S. is suspending visas and entry for people who recently passed through Congo, South Sudan, or Uganda, and hinting it might punish allies that don’t follow suit. Meanwhile, former USAID officials point out that the hollowed-out American presence on the ground slowed detection and contact tracing in the first place. But sure, let’s frame this as Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio selflessly safeguarding "millions of visitors" while the World Cup rolls through 16 North American cities and the administration furiously tries to retrofit a global health response onto the smoking crater of its own policies.

Kash Patel, Trump’s handpicked F.B.I. director and walking conflict-of-interest generator, has fired five bureau analysts over a 2023 internal memo about far-right extremists cozying up to “radical-traditionalist” Catholic groups. You know, the kind of overlap between white nationalism and religion that has been publicly documented for years and that the F.B.I. is actually supposed to notice. The memo was already withdrawn and internally reviewed back in 2024, with investigators finding it violated professional standards but showed “no evidence of malicious intent” — which in Trumpworld is clearly grounds for termination.

This is being sold as a grand defense of “religious freedom,” with Patel racing to social media to declare, “This FBI will never infringe on religious freedom,” shortly after tossing five careers into the wood chipper. Translation: the bureau will absolutely not look too closely at violent extremists if they wrap themselves in Latin Mass and a rosary. For decades, the F.B.I. has cultivated tripwires and sources in churches, mosques, universities, and businesses; now, under Trump 2.0, that’s rebranded as “weaponization” whenever it brushes against the president’s base.

The Richmond memo has become a MAGA holy relic, waved around as proof that the deep state hates Catholics, conservatives, and presumably anyone who thinks January 6 was just spirited tourism. The administration’s April “weaponization” report leaned on it heavily, while also smearing the Southern Poverty Law Center as some kind of donor-fraud conspiracy and then conveniently indicting the group a month later. The SPLC says it’s political retaliation; the same administration purging analysts for doing their jobs says it’s just law and order. Totally normal functioning democracy stuff.

Former law enforcement officials are, very politely, calling this what it is: a purge of independent civil servants to turn the F.B.I. into an ideologically compliant security service for the presidency. The message from Patel is clear: investigate extremists, but only the ones who don’t vote for Trump. Everyone else gets wrapped in the First Amendment like crime-scene tape and declared off-limits. America used to worry about the F.B.I. spying on churches; now the concern is that it’s not allowed to, even when the pews are full of people planning the next “Stop the Steal” field trip.

Marco Rubio’s State Department took a brief break from dismantling American diplomacy to log into X and accuse Britain of "ideological conditioning" and "two-tiered policing" – all while offering condolences for the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak. Because nothing says serious foreign policy like turning a grieving family’s tragedy into a test balloon for exporting Fox News talking points to allied countries.

Downing Street and David Lammy politely responded with the diplomatic equivalent of "what are you people talking about?", while the Liberal Democrats called it "flagrant foreign interference" – which is a very genteel way of saying "please tell the Trump administration to stop mainlining Farage and Musk’s feeds into official U.S. statements." Musk, meanwhile, has been using Nowak’s death as raw content for his ethno-nationalist fanbase, loudly insisting it proves anti-white bias, while simultaneously backing a hard-right UK party from the comfort of his billionaire grievance bunker.

Back in Britain, Keir Starmer is trying to deal with the actual facts: a horrific killing, police who handcuffed a dying teenager after a false racism accusation, an ongoing watchdog investigation, and far-right agitators using the case to attack officers in the streets. Washington’s contribution under Trump? Not help, not restraint, just Rubio’s State Department joining the dogpile to amplify the "civilisational decline" narrative. The U.S. used to send carrier groups and trade delegations; now it exports culture-war conspiracy branding in 280 characters or less.

Anti-Trump former Republicans are learning a hard lesson in 2026: you can’t spend a career helping light the house on fire and then be shocked when the firefighters don’t hand you the hose and a leadership title. Geoff Duncan, who only discovered Trump was a problem after the attempted coup, just got absolutely steamrolled in Georgia’s Democratic primary, finishing a distant fourth behind Keisha Lance Bottoms. In Pennsylvania, Ryan Crosswell — who quit DOJ when he was told to drop a corruption case against Eric Adams, i.e., when the authoritarianism got personally offensive — lost by 20 points to a union guy backed by actual Democrats who’ve been here longer than five minutes.

The party’s new vibe is: thanks for finally admitting the sky is blue, but we remember who helped build the climate machine. Strategists openly say the Liz Cheney/Kamala Harris unity tour was a one-time experiment in "let the arsonists manage the rebuild" and that nobody’s eager to repeat it. George Conway is now trying to complete his evolution from Federalist Society lawyer to Manhattan resistance hero and is currently polling… fourth. Apparently "I was very, very wrong for 30 years" is not the closing argument Democratic primary voters were craving.

Meanwhile, Olivia Troye — who worked for the RNC, the Bush administration, and Mike Pence before deciding, belatedly, that this might all be bad — briefly ran for Congress in Virginia as "a proud Democrat" before the state Supreme Court nuked the new map. She warns Democrats not to lump her in with other ex-Republicans, because they all disagree on lots of things. That’s the problem in a nutshell: the people who nurtured the authoritarian GOP for decades now want custom onboarding packages into the party they spent their careers undermining. Voters, it turns out, are less excited about that than MSNBC bookers and Never Trump PACs.

The SAVE America Act — Trump’s dream of turning voter registration into a paperwork obstacle course — just face-planted in the Senate after months of Republicans trying to sneak it through while primaries are already underway. The bill would have required every voter to cough up a passport, birth certificate, or similar proof of citizenship, despite years of research showing noncitizen voting exists at approximately the same frequency as honest statements from Trump: microscopic.

Georgetown’s Steve Vladeck politely translated the whole thing as, "the cure is way worse than the nonexistent disease," which is law-professor for "this is a giant voter-suppression scam." Trump, naturally, branded it a "country-saving" miracle and vowed he wouldn’t sign any other legislation until Congress passed it, because nothing says limited government like holding the entire legislative process hostage until you can make it harder for millions of Americans to vote.

Some Republicans, ever loyal to the guy who lost and won’t shut up about it, floated nuking or gaming the filibuster to ram this through — you know, the same filibuster they previously worshipped as a sacred constitutional relic when Democrats wanted to protect voting rights. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune eventually admitted they just didn’t have the votes. Turns out even in Trump’s America, there’s a limit to how many senators are willing to go on record as co-signing a national voter ID poll tax in the middle of an election year.

Trump has decided that the nation’s top spy job is basically a temp gig for whichever loyalist he wants to hand a badge and a conspiracy board to this week. Enter Bill Pulte, whose main qualifications for acting Director of National Intelligence appear to be (1) Trump likes him and (2) he used his perch at the Federal Housing Finance Agency to harass Trump’s perceived enemies. National security experience? Intelligence background? Statutory eligibility requirements? Adorable that you’re still asking.

The pushback from Republicans is so strong you’d almost think they remember what laws are. Thom Tillis grilled Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about whether he really threatened to punch Pulte, only for Bessent to proudly upgrade it to "kick his ass" on the record — and Tillis responded with a hearty "Good" before announcing he’d never vote to confirm Pulte. Marco Rubio, currently playing Secretary of State in this collapsing democracy LARP, politely noted he’d never heard of Pulte in any intelligence context, which is a Washington way of saying "this guy shouldn’t be anywhere near the nuclear codes." Even Mitch McConnell briefly woke from his long nap to remind everyone that the DNI job actually has legal experience requirements, and that Pulte does not meet them.

Trump’s response to all this? No worries, it’s just an "acting" role, he says — he doesn’t think Pulte would even want it permanently. Meanwhile he’s openly fantasizing that Pulte will "find out some things about the rigged elections" while running the intelligence community, casually advertising that the point of the appointment is to turn U.S. spy agencies into his personal election-fraud fan fiction bureau. The last DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, already test-drove this model by showing up at an FBI raid on a Georgia elections hub at Trump’s request, despite the minor detail that the DNI is banned from domestic law enforcement. She got blowback; he learned nothing.

So the pattern continues: treat statutory limits as suggestions, use "acting" titles as a cheat code around Senate confirmation, and hand the keys to the intelligence community to whichever sycophant is willing to weaponize it for Trump’s grievances. The only thing truly "acting" here is the pretense that any of this resembles a functioning rule-of-law government.

Donald Trump, America’s leading expert in projecting his own emotions onto other people, informed CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that she had “hatred in her eyes” after she committed the unforgivable journalistic crime of asking him hard questions. The NPR piece notes what anyone with a functioning memory already knows: when Trump goes after the press, he especially goes after women reporters, reserving his most personal, sneering attacks for the people who don’t smile and nod through his nonsense.

This isn’t just a guy having a bad day at a press conference; it’s a years-long pattern of trying to discredit the free press by turning female journalists into villains, heckling targets, and props for his base. Rather than answer questions, he critiques tone, demeanor, and alleged “hatred,” because it’s easier to call a woman “nasty” than explain why your administration is a rolling constitutional tire fire. Authoritarians go after the press; insecure authoritarians go after women in the press.

So the White House press area remains what it’s been for years: a stage where Trump acts out his fragile masculinity in front of cameras, and every woman with a press badge becomes fair game for public humiliation. The message to the rest of the media is clear—challenge him and you’ll be smeared; stay quiet and you might be allowed to keep your seat. Truly, a golden age for the First Amendment.