The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

As the 60-day War Powers Act deadline on Trump's Iran adventure lumbers into view, Congress is doing what it does best: holding conversations about maybe, possibly, at some indeterminate point, considering whether to assert the authority the Constitution already gave them. The law says they’re supposed to vote on this war. The political consultants say, "Have you considered a strongly worded bipartisan letter instead?" Guess which side is winning.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings are the other supposed safeguard, because when Congress refuses to check a president’s power, Gallup becomes the last branch of government. NPR politely notes what the polls say; the real story is that as long as his numbers aren’t subterranean, Republicans will keep handing him blank checks for foreign adventures, and Democrats will keep issuing outraged press releases like they’re legally binding documents. The War Powers Act remains, as always, more of a suggestion than a law.

The Trump administration finally noticed that Rwanda’s military has been doing war crimes like it’s a competitive sport in eastern Congo and slapped sanctions on the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) and senior officials. That instantly turned the Armée Patriotique Rwandaise Basketball Club – yes, the team literally owned by the sanctioned military – into a walking OFAC violation inside the NBA’s shiny Basketball Africa League. APR was quietly yanked from the tournament, replaced by the RSSB Tigers, because nothing says "clean break from authoritarianism" like swapping the army’s team for one owned by the state social security board.

The awkward part? The NBA has spent the last decade turning Paul Kagame into a courtside statesman, not a ruthless authoritarian who wins elections with 99% of the vote and exports chaos, massacres, and mineral plunder into the DRC. Kagame’s former aide Claire Akamanzi now runs NBA Africa, "Visit Rwanda" is slapped on the Los Angeles Clippers, and Kagame does the All-Star Game networking circuit while his army and proxy militias displace hundreds of thousands back home.

NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum has been insisting they just "follow the lead of the US government" on where to do business. The second that same government made the RDF legally radioactive, the league suddenly discovered that maybe the general’s team shouldn’t be in their feel-good Africa expansion project. For now, the NBA is technically in compliance, still happily partnered with the dictatorship itself, just not the bits of it Treasury has highlighted in red. The message: war crimes are bad, but if you move the logo from the army to the pension fund, we can still run the playoffs in Kigali and call it development.

Tucker Carlson, longtime Trump hype man and professional white grievance sommelier, is now reportedly remorseful about supporting the guy he spent years selling as a cross between George Washington and a Facebook uncle with Wi-Fi. NPR chats with Jason Zengerle, who literally wrote the book on Carlson, about Tucker's sudden, dramatic break from Trump — the political equivalent of the arsonist standing in front of the burning building and saying, "Boy, someone really should have done something."

The timing is, of course, impeccable: after years of amplifying lies, laundering authoritarian talking points, and cashing checks off the back of Trumpism, Carlson is now trying on the who, me? persona. It's a classic MAGA ecosystem move: spend a decade helping set democracy on fire, then pivot to "deeply concerned" commentator once the flames get uncomfortably close to your own reputation. Whether this is soul-searching or just brand maintenance, the damage was done long ago — and the people who believed him don't get a remorse tour.

Donald Trump, constitutional scholar of Fox News University, has once again discovered that the president of the United States is not, in fact, a one-man immigration code. A three-judge panel on the DC circuit just blocked his executive order that tried to shut down asylum access at the southern border because he declared an "invasion" on inauguration day and decided, personally, that the law no longer applied until he felt better about it.

The court helpfully reminded him that the Immigration and Nationality Act gives people the right to apply for asylum and that the president does not get to create "procedures of his own making" or erase mandatory protections against torture and persecution. Even Trump-appointed Judge Justin Walker could only manage a partial dissent, agreeing that, no, the commander-in-chief cannot just deport people to be persecuted or strip away the basic process that prevents that. Baby steps.

The White House response was to scream "liberal judges" and accuse the courts of being political, which is an interesting charge from an administration that calls everything an invasion and then claims sweeping powers to override statutes because they saw a scary segment on cable news. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted Trump was acting "completely within his powers" and that judges should be thanking him for stopping a supposed "scam" that let "tens of millions" fraudulently claim asylum, a number that—fun fact—does not exist outside the Mar-a-Lago math department.

The administration now threatens to run to the supreme court, because when your entire immigration agenda is built on pretending Congress never passed any laws, you might as well see how far the courts will let you push the fantasy. For now, though, the ruling delays Trump's latest attempt to convert asylum law into a vibes-based deportation machine.

The Trump administration has decided that citizenship is less a solemn, stable legal status and more a Costco membership you can revoke if you don’t like someone’s accent. DOJ officials say they’re targeting at least 300 foreign-born Americans for possible denaturalization, and USCIS has been told to trawl through files nationwide to cough up 100–200 potential victims per month, like it’s running a loyalty program for fascism. Federal prosecutors in field offices are now moonlighting as citizenship bounty hunters.

Publicly, DOJ insists this is all about “criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process” and brags it’s pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history under President Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Historically, denaturalization was rare and reserved for people who hid serious crimes or human rights abuses. Now the shopping list includes everyone from alleged national security risks to people who committed Medicaid fraud, because nothing says war crimes like billing the wrong medical code.

Context: about 800,000 people become citizens every year, and across Trump’s entire first term they filed only 102 denaturalization cases. Now they’re scaling up the machinery to make citizenship for immigrants a permanent probationary status. You thought naturalization meant you were American; Trump’s DOJ is here to clarify you’re actually just on a trial subscription, cancelable at any time by a government that’s suddenly very excited about its power to un-make citizens.