The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Pentagon, under orders from President Donald "I alone can see the aliens" Trump, has dumped its first batch of UFO files on the public, supposedly because of the "tremendous interest" from Americans. Conveniently, this sudden passion for transparency arrives just as Trump is, as the article delicately puts it, "suffocating in scandal and calamity" over his unlawful adventures in Venezuela and Iran. Why answer awkward questions from Congress when you can point at a blurry dot over Japan and yell: look, a saucer?

This circus plugs straight into Trump’s favorite storyline: he’s the brave outsider exposing the sinister deep state — unless, of course, the files are underwhelming, in which case the deep state is now so powerful it’s hiding the truth from the president himself. It’s a perfect closed loop: heads he’s the heroic truth-teller, tails the conspiracy just got deeper. Meanwhile, his sidekicks are happily workshopping their own fan fiction: Vice-President JD Vance declaring UFOs are actually demons, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hinting the government might be sitting on alien tech like a Floridian Bond villain with a security clearance.

The actual content of the release is, predictably, a gallery of grainy blobs, misidentified flares, and what appears to be a literal red balloon. Online sleuths debunked several clips before the ink on the press release dried, but the point was never evidence. It’s vibes. It’s distraction. It’s feeding a culture where people will believe in secret hangars full of little green men, but not in open, well-documented conspiracies like Wall Street wrecking the economy and getting bailed out, or presidents breaking international law. Why hide the real crimes in a secret base when you can do them in broad daylight while everyone argues about space demons?

The Trump administration has unveiled its bold new vision for the American West: dehydration, but make it federal policy. A 10-year plan for the drought-stricken Colorado River could cut up to 40% of current water supplies to Arizona, California, and Nevada — up to 3 million acre-feet a year, enough water for 6–9 million households. So, you know, an entire megacity or two. No big deal.

Arizona water official Tom Buschatzke described the proposed cuts as “sobering”, which is a tactful way of saying “we’re about to find out what happens when the Central Arizona Project goes to zero and Phoenix pretends it’s still a functioning city”. The feds are floating two options: jam it through under existing Colorado River law, which conveniently gives California the highest priority, or force the states to sign agreements while Washington stands there like a mob boss saying, "Nice little water supply you’ve got there, shame if something happened to it."

The upper basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico — are insisting that the lower basin states are the real problem, because nothing says "responsible resource management" like a century-long interstate blame game while reservoirs hit dead pool. California, Arizona, and Nevada tried to preempt the hammer by offering their own voluntary cuts, but the Bureau of Reclamation is still "evaluating" whether letting people collaborate beats just unilaterally turning the tap off every two years.

So the Trump-era water policy formula remains intact: decades of overuse, turbocharged climate crisis, a collapsing river that 40 million people depend on, and a federal plan that amounts to resetting the rules on a rolling basis while everyone argues over who has to be thirsty first. Governance by scarcity roulette — what could go wrong?