The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Nesrine Malik basically writes the field guide for understanding Trump’s second-term evil: it’s not the cinematic, uniformed, balcony-speech kind of fascism; it’s the stupid kind. The kind where a man can threaten “entire civilisations” while standing next to a gigantic Easter bunny, post himself as Jesus, and still unleash real wars, mass expulsions, and school bombings as background noise to his hurt feelings. The bodies pile up in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon while the president of the United States governs like a YouTube comments section with nuclear codes.

The essay shreds the comforting myth that Trump can’t be fascist or truly dangerous because he’s too inept, too silly, too online. Malik points out that history’s monsters were often ridiculous in real time – Mussolini was a clown before he was a corpse in a gas station. Evil doesn’t always show up in Hugo Boss; sometimes it arrives as a thin-skinned boomer live-streaming his grievances, forever terrified of humiliation and determined to bomb his way out of feeling small.

Malik zeroes in on the performance aspect: cruelty as pageant. It’s not enough for ICE to destroy families – it has to be merchandised, complete with Trump grinning next to alligators in ICE caps under the slogan “Alligator Alcatraz” like a summer blockbuster about state terror. The pleasure isn’t just in the violence, but in flaunting the license to commit it, like The Purge with more golf and fewer ethics briefings. The message: this isn’t some manageable, ideology-free tantrum phase; it’s jubilant, escalating brutality.

The column closes on the obvious but still somehow controversial point: you don’t negotiate with this, you don’t downplay it as apolitical chaos that will burn itself out. You either fight it – urgently – or you let an emotionally broken man with a sociopath’s appetite for escalation and a toddler’s impulse control keep "reigning in Hell" from the Oval Office. The vibes may be clownish, but the body count is not.

Pope Leo, the first American pope and apparently the last adult in the room, had to clarify that when he condemned "tyrants" who spend billions on "killing and devastation" instead of education and rebuilding, he wasn’t specifically subtweeting Donald Trump. The speech, he noted, was written two weeks earlier – i.e., before Trump decided to have a public meltdown because someone suggested war might be bad.

Trump, never one to pass up a chance to be the main character of global morality, responded by calling the Pope "WEAK on crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy" and then posting an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure, which he later deleted once someone presumably explained that this was a bit on the nose for the whole authoritarian personality cult vibe. This all comes after Trump warned that "a whole civilisation will die" if Iran doesn’t meet US demands over the war and the Strait of Hormuz, thereby treating potential mass death as just another negotiating tactic.

Meanwhile, Leo is touring Africa, talking about a "bloodstained" region of Cameroon, condemning an "endless cycle of destabilisation and death," and pointing out that the "masters of war" love how easy it is to destroy and how hard it is to rebuild. Trump’s response? Not reflection, not restraint, but a public feud with the Pope and some messianic AI cosplay. American foreign policy under Trump continues to be run like a cross between a televangelist show and a Call of Duty livestream.

Donald Trump has decided the best way to modernize drug policy is to hand the federal government’s psychedelic strategy to a podcaster and an anti-vax conspiracy heir, then tell the FDA to hit fast-forward. Via executive order, he’s directing the agency to "expedite" review of drugs like ibogaine, a powerful hallucinogen that might help with PTSD and addiction, while also dangling $50m in federal research money and another $50m conveniently lined up in Texas, the nation’s new testing ground for every culture war fever dream.

On paper, expanding evidence-based psychedelic treatment for veterans and people with substance use disorders is a sane, even overdue idea. In practice, this White House is treating the FDA like a content moderation team for Joe Rogan’s brain. The agency that’s supposed to be a buzzkill about safety and data is now under orders from a president who jokes, "Can I have some please? I don’t have time to be depressed," while RFK Jr – who previously accused the FDA of "aggressive suppression of psychedelics" – stands there as health secretary, nodding along like this is fine.

The reforms are framed as a breakthrough for science, but what’s really getting tested here is how much pressure the executive branch can put on a supposedly independent regulator whenever a pet cause lines up with a friendly media ecosystem and a red-state governor’s budget. If it works, great – more tools to fight PTSD and addiction. If it doesn’t, we’ve just taught future presidents that drug approval is a vibes-based negotiation between the Oval Office, a podcast studio, and whichever state wants to be the clinical-trial Thunderdome. America’s public health policy, now with 100% more ayahuasca-adjacent energy.

The Trump-Rubio-Musk brain trust has finally solved the age-old problem of "how do we stop millions of poor people from not dying?" by taking USAID – a six-decade-old pillar of US foreign policy – and shoving it “into the wood chipper”, Elon Musk’s own charming phrase for the DOGE-led cuts. Within months, Trump froze funding, announced dissolution, and by July had canceled over 80% of programs before stuffing the agency’s corpse into the state department and slapping on a "trade over aid" sticker so US companies wouldn’t feel left out of the carnage.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio dutifully bragged that 5,200 contracts spending "tens of billions" were gone, while Oxfam quietly pointed out that at least 23 million children will lose education and up to 95 million people will lose basic healthcare, with more than 3 million preventable deaths per year on the menu. So naturally, inside USAID, the political appointees behaved like a condo board with a grudge: a White House liaison demanding "Barney-style" slides so leadership might understand tuberculosis trials, paranoid Republicans insisting USAID was secretly providing abortions (it wasn’t, by law), and one senior official apparently convinced career staff killed his dog and therefore deserved to have their life’s work obliterated.

When acting global health chief Nicholas Enrich wrote a memo warning that freezing foreign aid would have "severe domestic and global consequences," he lasted a full 30 minutes before being put on leave – which, in this administration, counts as due process. Meanwhile, Musk waltzed into the White House to claim Ebola work had been restarted on the same day his DOGE crew canceled the contracts, because why let epidemiology get in the way of a good lie? The result: a small group of ignorant, vengeful ideologues and tech bros who neither understood nor cared what USAID did, gleefully shredding decades of expertise while calling it reform and selling it to the base as fighting "waste, fraud and abuse."

With his approval ratings tunneling somewhere below the Arizona bedrock, President Trump sought refuge in the one place where reality never quite makes it past the parking lot: a Turning Point USA rally at a megachurch. When your numbers are at record lows, you don’t broaden your coalition, you just crank the fog machine and preach to the already-converted in a tax-advantaged stadium for Jesus and merch sales.

This is the modern GOP strategy in miniature: wrap raw power in a sermon, run campaign events out of churches, and let Charlie Kirk’s youth propaganda factory provide the vibes while everyone politely pretends this isn’t one long test of how far you can push church–state boundaries before the IRS wakes up. It’s not governance, it’s not outreach, it’s just the same shrinking base getting louder in increasingly holy-sounding venues while the rest of the country quietly backs away.

The President stood before Turning Point USA — the nation’s premier conference for future podcast guests — and announced that the Pentagon will be releasing “very interesting documents” about UFOs “very, very soon.” Because when you’ve turned every other part of government into a reality show prop, why not weaponize the Department of Defense as your personal Ancient Aliens writers’ room?

Trump bragged that he’d ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — yes, the Fox News guy, not a typo — to comb through files on “alien and extraterrestrial life,” while the actual Pentagon quietly declined to say anything, presumably because they’re busy doing things like real national security. Meanwhile, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is threatening subpoenas over 46 UAP videos like she’s chasing down Watergate instead of blurry footage of what a 2024 report already said were mostly misidentified ordinary objects. Rep. Tim Burchett is on X thanking Trump for “keeping your word to me,” as if this is the moon landing and not a content drop for the conspiracy crowd.

The fun twist: multiple Pentagon reviews have already said there’s no credible evidence of a government alien cover-up, no proof of extraterrestrial life, and that most sightings are just… regular stuff. But why let that stop anyone from turning classification, oversight, and defense intelligence into a fan-service teaser campaign? If you were wondering whether the serious machinery of state would be used to methodically inform the public or to juice the base with vibes about little green men, the answer has arrived from Phoenix, and it’s wearing a red hat.

Maricopa County just had a judge decide which group of Republicans gets to sit closest to the election machinery, and Stephen Miller’s friends won. County recorder Justin Heap – a former GOP legislator who built a career gently fanning the ‘something’s wrong with our elections’ crowd without quite saying the magic words ‘stolen’ – sued the Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors for daring to control key election functions. The judge agreed the board had “acted unlawfully” by seizing his office’s staff, systems, and equipment, and handed Heap more authority over early voting and other operations.

The board says it’s only ever wanted to give Heap the resources he needs and that “voters always come first,” which is a fascinating way to describe a knife fight over who gets to place ballot drop boxes and run early voting in a state where MAGA conspiracy theorists have been screaming about bamboo ballots for four years. The previous recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, says Heap “catered to the really ugly stuff” and helped feed the harassment and threats aimed at the elections office. Naturally, Heap’s lawsuit arrived with the enthusiastic backing of America First Legal, the “public interest” group founded by Stephen Miller, now helpfully stationed in the White House as deputy chief of staff to make sure this kind of thing scales nationally.

So in Arizona’s largest county, the lesson is clear: whip up distrust in the election system, ride that wave into office, then use your new job – and Miller’s legal machine – to claw back more direct control over how people vote. The board is talking about an appeal, but the damage is done: the 2026 races in one of the country’s most important swing states will be run by a guy who built his brand on telling voters the system is trash, now armed with a court order and a far-right legal shop cheering from Washington. What could possibly go wrong with that for democracy.