trump’s billionaires-only tax plan is going great
Donald Trump, flanked by billionaires, announces another "middle-class tax cut" while someone quietly loads the Treasury into a Goldman Sachs-branded Brinks truck.
Bernie Sanders helpfully confirms what everyone with a paycheck and a pulse already suspected: under Trump’s tax regime, America is basically a private country club where 938 billionaires own the place and the rest of us are paying cover. The top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%, Elon Musk alone has more than half the country, and somehow the guy worth $805bn is paying a lower tax rate than the person driving your Amazon package to your door. Meanwhile, Trump and his family picked up an extra $4bn since his re-election, because the house always wins when the house writes the tax code.
While billionaires are out here paying effective tax rates that would embarrass a Cayman Islands shell company — 0.1% for Warren Buffett, under 1% for Jeff Bezos, 1.3% for Michael Bloomberg — Trump’s corporate tax bonanza lets giants like Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, Ticketmaster, and the Yum Brands empire pay zero in federal income taxes on tens of billions in profits. But don’t worry, 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck are definitely "sharing the sacrifice." Oh, and 15 million people were thrown off healthcare so the top 1% could get a trillion‑dollar tax cut. Truly a model of Christian governance.
Sanders proposes a 5% wealth tax on billionaires that would raise $4.4tn over a decade, enough to do wildly extremist things like: end homelessness, fund universal childcare, expand Medicare, raise teacher pay, and undo Trump’s healthcare cuts. Under this plan, Musk would owe $42bn and still be left with a paltry $792bn to scrape by, while Bezos and Zuckerberg would have to soldier on with a couple hundred billion each. The horror. As Justice Brandeis warned, you can have democracy or concentrated wealth, not both. Trump and his donors have made their choice. Sanders is simply pointing out that if this is a "populist" presidency, the only "people" it serves are billionaires and their accountants.
So yes, the rich could pay their fair share and we could have functioning healthcare, housing, and schools. Or we can keep pretending that a system where schoolteachers pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett is freedom. Under Trump’s America, the only redistribution happening is from the bottom 90% straight into the yachts of the 1%, and they’re still calling it a tax cut for "hardworking Americans" with a straight face.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting
epa puts methane rules on industry letterhead
EPA’s Aaron Szabo, hard at work transforming oil industry wish lists into official federal climate policy — now with government letterhead and fewer methane inspections.
The Trump EPA has discovered an exciting new way to streamline rulemaking: just hire the lobbyist who wrote the industry's anti-regulation letter and put him in charge of climate policy. Aaron Szabo, now assistant administrator overseeing federal climate rules, turns out to have been the hidden author of a 2022 American Exploration and Production Council letter attacking Biden-era methane regulations. His name never appeared in the document, but the PDF metadata helpfully credited him, because apparently even Adobe thinks this level of corruption deserves a byline.
Once a registered lobbyist for Ovintiv and other oil and chemical companies, Szabo told the Senate he had simply "learned how regulated entities comply" and that industry folks "want to ensure the environment is properly protected" — which is a poetic way of describing writing arguments to gut methane rules that would have cut emissions by nearly 80%. Now, inside the EPA, he’s doing the same work with a government salary and an official seal, soliciting not just "input" from oil and gas groups but actual draft regulatory text, exemptions and all. Internal emails show EPA staff parroting industry buzzwords like "additional flexibility" while quietly pushing back compliance deadlines and workshopping loopholes with trade groups behind closed doors.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse calls this proof the EPA has been captured by the industry it’s supposed to regulate; oil lobbyists call it "one of the more fascinating meetings" they’ve ever had, now that the agency is "suddenly willing" to talk about everything they’ve wanted for years. Methane, a climate superpollutant responsible for a third of global warming and 80 times more potent than CO₂ in the short term, is getting carefully massaged into a minor inconvenience on paper so that ConocoPhillips, Hilcorp, and friends can keep venting and leaking with fewer pesky inspections. The endangerment finding is gone, the cops are working for the robbers, and the Environmental Protection Agency is once again laser-focused on protecting the environment’s biggest polluters.
So yes, the Trump administration is "unleashing American energy" — mostly by chaining the EPA to a conference table with industry lobbyists, a red pen, and a stack of draft exemptions helpfully labeled "reg. text language." Climate policy is now a Choose Your Own Adventure written by Big Oil, and spoiler: the planet does not get a happy ending.
#corruption#forever-grifting#anti-science
trump moves forest service, wildfires to be managed from vibes
Artist’s rendering of the new Forest Service HQ: a single cubicle in Salt Lake City labeled ‘Wildfires, Climate Change, Everything Else’.
The Trump administration is once again speed‑running the "how to destroy an agency without technically abolishing it" playbook, announcing that the US Forest Service headquarters will be yanked out of Washington DC and dropped in Salt Lake City, while its regional offices are simply… shut down. They’re also switching to a "state-based model" with 15 directors, because nothing says coherent wildfire and watershed management like carving up 200 million acres of interconnected ecosystems into a federalist group project.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a rerun of the 2019 Bureau of Land Management relocation stunt that vaporized nearly 90% of its DC staff, only for Biden to drag the agency back to Washington like a dog that escaped the yard. This time, they’re aiming for the Forest Service, which already has about 90% of its workforce outside the capital—but sure, the real problem is that the remaining scientists and policy people haven’t been sufficiently scattered to the winds. Conservation groups are calling it what it is: an attempt to dismantle a 120-year-old agency, gut its scientific capacity, and smooth the way for the Mike Lee crowd that dreams of auctioning off public lands like they’re leftover office furniture.
Elon Musk’s beloved "department of government efficiency" already gutted the Forest Service workforce, so now the plan is to finish the job by shutting down research stations nationwide and consolidating everything into one facility in Fort Collins. Because when wildfires, invasive species, and climate impacts are exploding across an entire continent, the obvious solution is a single research hub and a bunch of new org charts. Utah governor Spencer Cox is cheering the move and the promise of "hundreds of jobs"—apparently replacing career scientists and land managers with a handful of new HQ staff is now a net win. Colorado’s Jared Polis is also applauding, because if there’s one thing this timeline excels at, it’s bipartisan enthusiasm for rearranging deck chairs while the forests literally burn.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump to personally supervise dismantling of the 14th amendment
Trump, moments after announcing he'll bring 'take your autocrat to court' day to the Supreme Court.
Trump has decided that merely stacking the Supreme Court with loyalists isn’t quite hands-on enough, so he’s planning to attend oral arguments in a case that could gut birthright citizenship in the U.S. The January 2025 executive order at issue would restrict citizenship to babies with at least one U.S. citizen or green card–holding parent, which is a cute way of saying let’s pretend the 14th Amendment doesn’t mean what it obviously says.
There is, according to both the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court Historical Society, no record of any sitting president ever attending oral arguments. Naturally, Trump looked at 200+ years of presidents respecting judicial independence and said: what if I just show up and glare at them while they decide whether my blatantly unconstitutional order flies? This comes only weeks after he called justices "disloyal to the Constitution" for striking down his tariffs, which is rich from the guy trying to erase birthright citizenship by executive fiat.
So on Wednesday, the justices will hear arguments about whether the president can unilaterally rewrite a constitutional guarantee, while the author of that executive order sits in the room like a mob boss doing performance reviews. Separation of powers has now been downgraded to a vibes-based suggestion, and the 14th Amendment is learning the hard way what happens when your continued existence depends on the backbone of a Court Trump thinks he owns.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump tries to cancel sesame street for hurting his feelings
Big Bird, now apparently a subversive left-wing operative, narrowly escapes defunding by a president who lost a fight with basic civics.
Donald Trump looked at the First Amendment, looked at Big Bird, and decided the real threat to America was public radio and educational TV. His executive order told every federal agency to "cut off any and all funding" to NPR and PBS because he thinks their reporting is too "left wing"—which US district judge Randolph Moss gently translated as: this is straight-up unconstitutional retaliation and "viewpoint discrimination" so blatant it practically came with its own civics lesson.
Moss permanently blocked the order, pointing out that the government couldn’t cite a single case where it was allowed to blacklist specific organizations from all federal programs because of their past speech. The White House, via spokesperson Abigail Jackson, responded by calling it a "ridiculous ruling by an activist judge", because nothing screams "constitutional originalism" like using the power of the purse to punish news outlets that make the president mad.
Of course, by the time the judge arrived to scrape the First Amendment off the pavement, Congress had already joined the fun and voted to defund public broadcasting, forcing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to shut down and slashing millions from PBS Kids, which had to lay off a third of its staff. So while NPR, PBS, and their lawyers are celebrating a "victory for freedom of the press," the message from Trump’s America is still clear: report the news, lose your funding. The Constitution survives on paper; the institutions it was supposed to protect, not so much.
Meanwhile, PBS and NPR vow to keep serving the public interest, which in this administration is apparently defined as "not flattering the president 24/7"—a standard that will get you defunded faster than you can say Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump admin celebrates 'pro-life' agenda by choking off birth control money
Neighborhood Health's Cayce Place clinic, bravely attempting to provide cancer screenings and birth control while the federal government plays Calvinball with its funding.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in "pro-life" policy: quietly letting federal funding for birth control and basic reproductive health care just...expire. Title X grants that normally get renewed on April 1 are now in limbo because Health and Human Services waited until March 13 to open applications and then gave clinics a week to submit paperwork for a program that serves more than 2.8 million mostly low-income patients. Traditionally HHS takes 70–90 days to review applications; this year they appear to be operating on the "what if we just don't?" timeline.
Instead of answering whether money will actually show up on time, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon sent out a statement about the 2027 grant process — a bit like your landlord responding to "Are you evicting me tomorrow?" with a brochure about neighborhood development plans. Clinics are now debating how far they can drain their savings, whether they have to cut staff, and if they should start charging poor patients for insulin and Pap smears while they pray for retroactive reimbursement that HHS won't even promise. Meanwhile, Trump’s 2026 budget tried to eliminate all $286 million for Title X entirely, and this comes after his first-term gag rule already forced about 1,000 clinics out of the program.
So to recap: the administration that screams about abortion at every microphone is deliberately sabotaging the federal program that funds contraception, cancer screenings, STI treatment, and basic reproductive care for people who can’t afford it, then hiding behind paperwork and "agency priorities." It’s less a health policy than a social control strategy: make pregnancy prevention harder, make health care more expensive, and call it moral leadership. April Fools’ Day, brought to you by the people who think your uterus is federal property.
#healthcare#pro-life#killing-democracy
trump’s iran war makes your peaches more patriotic and also unaffordable
A towering plume of smoke from an oil refinery helpfully illustrates how US foreign policy turns crude into profits for oil companies and financial shrapnel for everyone else.
American farmers are discovering the fun surprise at the bottom of Trump’s Iran war cereal box: ruinous fertiliser bills and fuel prices that look like ransom demands. As the Middle East conflict drags on, the cost of just keeping crops alive is detonating faster than any Pentagon press briefing can spin it.
Yet, in a plot twist that would get rejected from a satire script for being too on-the-nose, some of these same farmers tell the BBC they still support Trump and the war strategy that’s vaporising their profit margins. They’re paying more to plant, more to harvest, more to ship — and still cheering for the policy that turned their input costs into a patriotic bonfire.
So the war machine hums along, oil markets spike, fertiliser prices soar, and the people getting crushed on the front lines of the economy are told this is all part of Making America Great Again. You don’t need universal healthcare when you’ve got war-induced cost inflation and a president who treats farmers like a political backdrop for photo ops and flag-draped economic misery.
#imperialism#money#trumps-america
trump’s big iran idea: war crimes but make it maritime
A retired four-star general patiently explaining that bombing drinking water and seizing foreign islands is not, in fact, 4-D chess—just regular old illegal and stupid.
On Meet the Press, a retired four-star general had the unenviable job of explaining that, actually, turning off an entire country’s water by bombing its desalination plants is bad — strategically, morally, and under that pesky thing called international law. The fact that this needs to be said on national television tells you everything about where Trump-world’s foreign policy brain trust is right now: somewhere between a Call of Duty lobby and a war crimes tribunal.
As NBC notes, Trump is also toying with the idea of seizing Iran’s Kharg Island, a vital oil export hub, which experts politely describe as a “very dangerous endeavor” instead of the more accurate “congratulations, you just started a shooting war in the Gulf.” So we’ve got a former president fantasizing about grabbing foreign territory and targeting civilian water infrastructure, while the grown-ups in uniform go on TV to gently remind everyone that collective punishment and territorial seizures are the kind of thing we supposedly oppose when Russia does it. American leadership now consists of retired generals doing damage control on Sunday shows while Trump tests how many Geneva Conventions you can violate in a single brainstorm.
#imperialism#lawlessness#national-security
trump invents 'self-deportation by email,' judge reminds him laws exist
Migrant shows the CBP One app, which under Trump was apparently repurposed from legal entry tool to "click here to ruin your life" button.
The Trump administration looked at hundreds of thousands of migrants who followed the rules, used the CBP One app like they were told under Biden, obtained lawful parole and work permits, and thought: what if we just delete their lives with a mass email? So DHS hit send on "It is time for you to leave the United States" notices, yanked their work authorizations, and rebranded the app from a legal entry tool into a "self-deportation" button. Governing by Terms of Service pop-up.
A federal judge in Massachusetts has now done the unthinkable: read the law. Judge Allison Skye Burroughs ruled that DHS "exceeded the agency's statutory authority" and even violated its own regulations when it terminated parole for roughly 900,000 migrants who entered via the app. Translation: you can't just turn people from "lawfully present" into "illegal aliens" overnight because Stephen Miller’s ghost wrote a press release.
Trump’s DHS had defended the purge by accusing Biden of "abusing" parole and fueling the "worst border crisis in US history"—while simultaneously trying to erase lawful status for people who complied with that very system. Now, thanks to the lawsuit from the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts and several affected women, their parole and work authorization are restored nationwide. It’s not a path to permanent residency, but it is a rare moment where the courts tell the White House: you don’t get to run immigration policy like an unsubscribe list.
#lawlessness#anti-immigration
judge reminds trump the white house is not mar-a-lago north
Artist’s rendering: the East Wing, but make it Mar-a-Lago banquet hall, courtesy of one very confused "steward" who thinks he owns the place.
A federal judge had to put down his gavel and pick up a parenting voice to explain to President Donald Trump that, no, he cannot just knock down the East Wing of the White House to install his very own mega-ballroom like it's a new wing on a golf resort. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon — notably a George W. Bush appointee, not exactly Antifa’s in-house counsel — ruled that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have” for this little demolition-and-disco project.
Leon temporarily blocked any further demolition, excavation, or construction on Trump’s dream ballroom, allowing only work needed for safety and security, and then politely paused his own order for 14 days so the administration can appeal. He also felt compelled to write the civics lesson of the decade: the president is the “steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” Translation: you’re a tenant, Don, not the landlord.
The judge made clear that unless and until Congress explicitly authorizes this fever dream of a donor-funded party bunker, the construction has to stop. Speaking of donors, Comcast — parent company of NBCUniversal, which reported this story — helpfully chipped in for the ballroom fund, because nothing captures the spirit of late-stage American democracy like media conglomerates helping finance an unauthorized presidential vanity construction project on a national landmark.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump closes historic border road to protect america from canadian farmers
Sign politely indicating the international boundary where the Trump administration has decided friendly neighbors are now a security risk.
The Trump administration has bravely identified the gravest threat to American security: two Canadians who access their homes via a dusty farm road and some neighbors who share equipment and childhood bike routes. So, naturally, DHS is shutting down a nine-mile stretch of "Border Road" between Montana and Alberta after more than 80 years of informal, peaceful crossings, citing "irregular migration" and drug smuggling. When you can’t competently manage asylum law, ports of entry, or actual trafficking networks, you go after wheat fields and grandmas.
Canada, ever the straight man in this abusive comedy duo, is now spending C$8m to build a parallel road on their side so farmers and families can keep some semblance of normal life. The result: two roads running side by side, one American, one Canadian, like a sad Cold War diorama sponsored by John Deere. Locals on both sides call the closure "unfortunate" and "ridiculous," which is polite prairie-speak for "this is what happens when your neighbor elects a guy who thinks national security is a vibes-based concept." DHS, of course, did not respond to the BBC, presumably busy reviewing satellite photos of suspicious Canadian grain silos.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
trump’s doj brags about ‘cleaning house,’ accidentally hands fired fbi agents exhibit a
FBI Director Kash Patel, seen here proudly running the Federal Bureau of Loyalty Tests.
The Trump administration’s war on independent law enforcement has reached the "accidentally confessing at CPAC" stage. Three former FBI special agents who worked on federal public corruption cases tied to Trump — Michelle Ball, Jamie Garman and Blaire Toleman — just filed a lawsuit over their "illegal" firings, and their star witness is… Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Blanche, who used to be Trump’s personal lawyer and is now somehow the No. 2 at DOJ, proudly told CPAC that FBI Director Kash Patel had "cleaned house" so thoroughly that there’s not a single armed agent left who had anything to do with prosecuting Trump. Subtle.
The suit says more than 50 FBI employees have been kicked to the curb without the slightest hint of due process, while Trumpworld loudly smears them as corrupt and biased for the crime of doing their jobs. Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi — both described in the complaint as among Trump’s "most devoted loyalists" — are accused of running a retribution campaign "timed to drive headlines and curry favor with political supporters." Ball’s firing just happened to line up with Bondi’s Senate Judiciary testimony; Toleman was fired, unfired, and re-fired like a glitchy HR software demo; and Garman was tossed out after a decade of federal service. Rule of law has been replaced by "how will this play on Fox tonight?"
The agents also helpfully remind the court that Patel wrote a 2022 children’s book called The Plot Against the King, casting himself as Trump’s heroic knight, while ex–co-deputy FBI director Dan Bongino allegedly spent his podcasting days boosting election-fraud conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the government’s legal position in a related case is basically: the president can purge high-level law enforcement officials if he feels like it because "constitutional prerogative." Bondi even issued a February memo retroactively blessing Patel’s earlier firings, just to make sure the paperwork matched the purge. This isn’t an administration managing personnel; it’s a loyalty test with badges and guns.
So to recap: the FBI’s public corruption squad that helped Jack Smith build the now-vanished Trump cases was folded, dozens of agents tied to those investigations were removed, top officials are bragging on stage that they eliminated everyone who touched Trump prosecutions, and those same officials are insisting in court it’s all perfectly normal. Totally what a healthy democracy’s justice system looks like.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#retribution
white house wants unlicensed wellness guru to run public health
Dr. Casey Means, future Surgeon General of Gut Feelings, prepares to lead America’s public health corps without the burden of an active medical license or consensus science.
The Trump White House is demanding the Senate hurry up and confirm Dr. Casey Means as Surgeon General, while Trump himself shrugs on Air Force One that he doesn’t really know what’s going on with her nomination, but hey, there are “a lot of great candidates.” Nothing says serious governance like the president publicly wandering off-message while his press secretary insists he is 100% committed to the nominee.
The nominee in question: an entrepreneur and bestselling wellness author whose greatest professional achievement appears to be yelling at processed food, who does not have an active medical license, has not completed a residency, and has a long trail of vaccine, birth control, and pesticide skepticism she tried to dodge under oath. Even Trump’s own former Surgeon General Jerome Adams is out here gently screaming that the person in charge of a corps that requires active medical licenses should maybe, possibly, have an active medical license — and maybe also not waffle on measles vaccines during a national outbreak.
Complicating this brave new era of vibes-based medicine, Means is not only a campaign alum of RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” crusade, she’s also perfectly positioned in the family-and-friends plan: her brother Calley is a White House adviser, and her talking points are now planks of Kennedy’s agenda. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, usually the patron saints of “deep concern followed by yes votes,” are suddenly hung up on small details like her past skepticism of hepatitis B shots for newborns and her psilocybin use. The Senate promptly responded to all this by doing the most productive thing it knows how to do in a crisis: adjourning for a two-week Easter recess.
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
trump’s god squad grants oil companies dominion over the fishes of the sea
The Trump administration’s ‘God squad’ carefully weighing the fate of an entire species against the sacred right of BP to drill another ultra-deepwater hole in the ocean and somehow deciding this is what God would want.
After 30+ years of hibernation, the federal “God squad” has been dragged out of its crypt so the Trump administration can do what it loves most: sacrifice endangered species on the altar of oil company profits and call it "national security". Defense secretary Pete Hegseth demanded – and got – an exemption from the Endangered Species Act for Gulf of Mexico drilling, despite the minor detail that only about 51 Rice’s whales are left and the Gulf is still basically a BP crime scene with waves.
Chaired by interior secretary Doug Burgum, the extinction committee – sorry, Endangered Species Committee – voted unanimously to greenlight more drilling, even as a fresh spill just smeared oil across seven protected reserves and a federal judge had literally just smacked down Trump’s earlier attempts to weaken ESA rules. So the administration’s solution was not to follow the law, but to assemble a panel of cabinet officials and give themselves permission to ignore it.
Hegseth insists this is all about stopping Iran and protecting Americans from high gas prices, not about bailing out fossil fuel companies threatened by those pesky lawsuits from environmental groups. Meanwhile, legal experts openly warn this move could knowingly wipe the Rice’s whale off the planet, potentially making Trump the first president to deliberately exterminate a species for the sake of another BP ultra-deepwater science experiment. The ESA says it’s illegal to harm endangered species; the God squad says it’s illegal to harm quarterly earnings. Guess which law wins.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump’s spiritual adviser for ‘family values’ is a convicted child sex abuser, so that tracks
Pictured: a former Trump ‘spiritual adviser’ demonstrating the administration’s unique approach to family values.
America’s booming Christian-industrial complex delivered yet another miracle: Robert Morris, founder of Texas megachurch Gateway and one-time White House spiritual adviser to Donald Trump, is out of jail after serving a grand total of six months for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl in the 1980s. He pleaded guilty to five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child, got a 10-year sentence, and then watched most of it disappear into the magical land of suspended time, probation, and a $270,000 check.
Back in the Reagan era, Morris was a 21-year-old traveling preacher welcomed into a family home, where he abused a 12-year-old girl, Cindy Clemishire, who has spent decades trying to rebuild her life while he built one of the largest megachurches in the country and cozy relationships with Republican power. She had to publicly remind the world that there is no such thing as consent from a 12-year-old while the man who assaulted her got to spend the Trump years praying over the presidency and hosting the guy at Gateway for a 2020 "roundtable" on "transition to greatness".
So now this registered sex offender, who once helped shape the administration’s pious "family values" branding, walks free under supervision while evangelicals who cheered Trump’s moral crusade pretend they had no idea. Of course the ecosystem that screamed about drag queens and school libraries had an alleged child predator in the inner spiritual circle; that’s not a bug, it’s the operating system.
#perverts#forever-grifting
trump’s ‘save america’ act mostly saves republicans from voters
Trump, mid-rant, explaining that the only way to restore faith in elections is to keep fewer people from having them.
Donald Trump has found a new toy to break democracy with: the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which he keeps rebranding as the Save America Act because of course he does. He’s declared it his “No. 1 priority,” vowed not to sign any other bills until it passes, and bragged it will “guarantee the midterms” for his party. Subtle. The bill would force people to prove citizenship in person just to register, gut mail-in voting, severely restrict online registration, and hand state voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security so the feds can helpfully “clean up” the lists — by purging voters. All to stop a kind of non-citizen voter fraud that research shows basically doesn’t exist.
This isn’t election security; it’s a federally coordinated voter suppression project with an official presidential slogan. After years of Trump screaming that elections are “rigged” and that mail-in ballots are corrupt, public trust has cratered: confidence in fair elections is down 10 points since 2024, and the U.S. has slid from 37th to 43rd globally in election confidence. Mission accomplished, Mr. President. While Republicans insist Democrats only oppose the bill to protect their imaginary army of fraudulent voters, polls show Americans now increasingly expect to show up at the polls and be told they’re “not eligible.” When DHS is being positioned as the national voter-roll bouncer, that’s not paranoia; that’s reading the fine print.
Fifty-odd years ago, the federal government used its power to expand the franchise with the Voting Rights Act. Now we’ve got a president threatening a legislative hostage situation to ram through a law designed to make voting harder and less trusted, then calling it “saving America.” This is what happens when you put a guy who lost the popular vote — twice — in charge of deciding how many people should be allowed to vote next time.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
great news: the government has decided to pay workers for their jobs again
Behold: a functioning TSA line, temporarily restored after the president remembered that workers need money to live.
Airports are suddenly moving again, and not because the Trump administration discovered competence. TSA lines are shrinking now that workers are finally receiving paychecks and returning to their posts, which is being reported like some kind of economic miracle rather than the bare-minimum undoing of a crisis the government itself engineered.
Instead of admitting that holding federal workers’ livelihoods hostage was a grotesque stunt, the White House gets to bask in headlines about how travel is "back to normal"—as if normal now means: work weeks for free, wait while politicians do cable hits, then celebrate when your own paycheck shows up like it’s a surprise bonus. It’s hostage negotiation as HR policy.
The real security theater isn’t the shoe-removal line; it’s an administration that treats critical safety staff as disposable pawns, then expects applause when it grudgingly stops abusing them. Travelers get shorter lines, TSA officers get to pay rent again, and Trump gets to pretend this wasn’t all a self-inflicted wound. Five stars, would definitely govern like a failed state again.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump builds a columbus shrine and turns federal agents into ufc extras
Christopher Columbus returns to the White House lawn, because this administration looked at 500 years of colonial atrocities and said, “Great brand synergy.”
While normal countries wrestle with how to honor collective struggle and democratic movements, the Trump administration is busy doing what it does best: digging up the worst possible symbolism and stapling it to the White House lawn. After Black Lives Matter protesters in Baltimore sent a Christopher Columbus statue to its rightful home at the bottom of the harbor, Trump’s crew lovingly commissioned a replica and plopped it down on the people’s property, like a giant middle finger to anyone who doesn’t think genocide is a cute aesthetic. Why respect the communities who tore these monuments down when you can cosplay as the world’s tackiest colonial restoration project?
Not content with worshipping dead colonizers, Trump’s handpicked tough guys are busy turning the federal government into a live-action Call of Duty lobby. At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth apparently thinks the U.S. military is a CrossFit cult with nukes, while at the FBI, Kash Patel decided what agents really need isn’t language skills, cyber expertise or civil-rights training, but UFC fighters to teach them how to punch people. Because nothing says “serious law enforcement in a democracy” like converting your intelligence service into a taxpayer-funded fight club. While ordinary people in places like Minneapolis are quietly risking their lives to protect neighbors from ICE, Trump’s America is out here putting Columbus on a pedestal and treating federal agents like extras in a low-budget action movie. Authoritarian vibes, reality-TV execution.
#killing-democracy#fascism
manifest destiny, but make it the moon
Trump staring at the sky like a man trying to remember whether he already trademarked "TRUMP MOON RESORT & CASINO".
The Trump White House has discovered a bold new frontier for America First: anywhere that can't vote him out. Enter Artemis, a NASA mission that scientists describe as a crucial step toward a permanent lunar base and eventually Mars, and Trump describes as a great place to plant flags, mine stuff, and own China in the ratings. The administration is selling the first deep-space journey since 1972 as a unifying national moment, which is a cute pitch from a government currently busy bombing Iran and tearing itself apart over immigration and the economy.
Instead of the old "for all mankind" thing, we now get NASA administrator Jared Isaacman promising that "America will never again give up the Moon" while Trump signs an executive order turning the lunar surface into a branding exercise and potential extraction zone. The Cold War space race at least pretended to be about human progress; this one is openly about who gets the best seat at the helium-3 gold rush and whose flag gets to loom over everyone else's. Call it the Artemis Accords meets a real estate seminar.
So while three Americans and one Canadian strap themselves to a rocket in the name of exploration, the president is busy framing the whole thing as a geopolitical turf war and a campaign ad with better lighting. The message is clear: the Moon is no longer a shared human achievement, it's prime beachfront property in Trump's cosmic trade war. If you were hoping the final frontier might escape 21st-century nationalism, sorry — we’re exporting that too.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
civil rights agency heroically defends most oppressed class: fortune 500 white guys
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, seen here preparing to bravely shield white executives from the existential threat of diversity trainings.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, born out of the Civil Rights era to protect vulnerable workers, has now been lovingly repurposed by Trump-appointed chair Andrea Lucas as the Equal Feelings of White Dudes Commission. Lucas blasted out a letter to Fortune 500 leaders warning them that their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts might be illegal if they take race or sex into account at all. Because nothing honors the legacy of Selma quite like telling Nike and Planned Parenthood to please stop being so mean to white men in middle management.
Lucas has launched an EEOC probe into Nike’s hiring and promotion practices to see whether they disadvantage white people, wrung a $500,000 settlement out of a Planned Parenthood affiliate over alleged discrimination and harassment against white staff, and then went on social media to personally invite white men to file complaints if they feel harmed by DEI. The agency that once chased systemic racism in hiring is now chasing the terrifying scourge of uncomfortable conversations about equity in HR training.
Instead of targeting employers who underpay, harass, or fire marginalized workers, Lucas is lecturing corporate America to “reject identity politics” while centering the entire enforcement agenda on the identity politics of aggrieved white guys. The EEOC’s original mission was to dismantle barriers for people who had none of the power; under Trump’s legacy appointees, it’s rapidly becoming a taxpayer-funded help desk for those who’ve had it all and are outraged that someone else got a mentorship program.
#killing-democracy#racism
