The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Sen. Bill Cassidy went on national television to bravely confess that his vote to convict Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection “might be” a liability in a Republican primary — as if the problem here is his campaign prospects, not the whole "violent attempt to overturn an election" part. When the party line is that backing the Constitution is a risky brand decision, you’re not a political movement anymore, you’re a loyalty cult with better stationary.

This is the modern GOP job interview: "Did you support Trump’s effort to cling to power after losing?" Answer "yes" and you’re a patriot. Answer "no" and, as Cassidy helpfully explains, you’ve created a messaging challenge for yourself with the base that now treats not supporting a coup as a character flaw. American democracy remains technically alive, but only because its would‑be executioners are still busy polling the focus groups.

The Trump administration spent last week workshopping new ways to make sure no one can ever prove what they did. First, the Justice Department coughed up a 52-page fever dream from election-denying Alito clerk T. Elliot Gaiser declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional – because apparently Congress has no "legislative purpose" in asking presidents not to shred history like a mob accountant. Conveniently, this would let Trump decide which evidence of wrongdoing lives, dies, or gets fed to the Mar-a-Lago pool filter.

As a visual aid, Trump also dropped an AI-rendered promo for his "presidential library" – a Miami waterfront skyscraper that looks less like an archive and more like a timeshare for oligarchs. He helpfully clarified, "I don’t believe in building libraries or museums," which is at least the most honest thing he’s said about education. Instead of documents, the plan is a golden statue of himself and a 747 in the atrium, because when your legacy is pardoning January 6 rioters, purging DOJ and FBI officials who investigated them, and making entire databases of insurrection charges vanish, there’s not much left to shelve besides the merch.

To really cement the amnesia project, Trump fired the actual Archivist of the United States and replaced her with Marco Rubio and a senior archivist from the Richard Nixon Foundation, because if you’re going to erase presidential crimes, you might as well bring in the franchise players. Meanwhile, cronies like Corey Lewandowski reportedly strut around DHS bragging that Trump will pardon them for anything, while figures like Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi hover in the gray zone of maybe-pre-pardoned, maybe-just-blackmailable. The Supreme Court’s 2024 gift of near-total presidential immunity is the cherry on top: corrupt pardons and document destruction now come bundled with a constitutional warranty.

Democrats are left talking about truth commissions and shaming website-scrubbers, which is adorable against an administration that openly markets itself as a historical Etch A Sketch. The message from Trump World is brutally simple: loyalty gets you impunity, impunity gets you amnesia, and amnesia keeps the grift going. The American people’s right to "reconstruct and come to terms with their history" has been replaced with an AI video of a fake library and a real plan to burn the archives.

The US has launched an illegal, unprovoked war on Iran and instead of bothering with constitutional niceties like Congress or declared war, the Trump administration has decided to market it like a cross between the Winter Olympics and Call of Duty. One minute drones are giving us gorgeous slow‑mo shots of skiers, the next they’re serving up snackable war crimes content of Iranian civilians and infrastructure getting vaporized, all trimmed into neat two‑minute clips for your doomscrolling pleasure.

This isn’t just aesthetic overlap; it’s policy. The White House hasn’t even pretended to justify the war or seek authorization. Instead, it’s busy meme-ifying mass death, dropping Hollywood and gaming imagery into official videos and reframing the whole thing as sports fandom: no context, no bodies, just clean highlight reels of "targets" exploding. The Pentagon used drone racing as a recruiting pipeline and gear incubator, then quietly graduated to the big leagues: Shahed knockoffs and US-made Lucas drones as the defining weapons of a forever streamable conflict.

Trump’s own briefings are now reportedly daily hype videos of “stuff blowing up”, edited by a team of social media managers like they’re cutting a Wembanyama dunk package. The commander-in-chief is basically watching a personalized war TikTok while the rest of the country is nudged to consume the Iran campaign like March Madness: passive, remote, and stripped of any human cost. Who needs constitutional checks and public debate when you’ve got drone footage, EDM, and a president treating an undeclared war as his favorite new content vertical?

Donald Trump, now fully committed to speedrunning the authoritarian playbook, used a White House press conference to threaten that his administration will tell a media outlet: "national security, give [the source] up or go to jail" over reporting on a missing US airman in Iran. He didn’t bother naming the outlet or the reporter, because the point wasn’t precision – the point was to broadcast that the government will happily dangle jail time over journalists until they cough up their sources. The First Amendment remains technically in effect, but only because Trump hasn’t figured out how to issue executive orders against the Constitution in all caps yet.

This is not a one-off tantrum; it’s a continuation. The same administration already sent the FBI to raid Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home after she used more than 1,000 anonymous sources to document Trump’s federal government clown show. Now the message to the press is clear: report on what the government doesn’t like, and the president will personally fantasize about you in an orange jumpsuit. As the Freedom of the Press Foundation gently reminded him, journalists don’t work for the government, and the First Amendment doesn’t magically disappear every time a president says "national security" like it’s a Hogwarts spell. But Trump’s second-term project is obvious: turn leaks into crimes, journalism into collaboration, and the press corps into a parole board meeting.

The Michigan Democratic party looked at its 2024 faceplant with Arab American voters and said: "What if we just do that again, but louder?" In a tight three-way Senate primary, state senator Mallory McMorrow and her friends in the professional centrist-industrial complex are trying to bludgeon Abdul El-Sayed by screaming "antisemitism" at Hasan Piker, a Muslim streamer with 3 million followers whose main crime appears to be criticizing Israel’s ongoing habit of turning Gaza and southern Lebanon into craters. Helping out: the Anti-Defamation League, Third Way, Senator Elissa Slotkin, and, for that extra dystopian flavor, the Trump administration, all happily aligned on the noble project of policing who Democrats are allowed to stand next to on a stage.

Arab American leaders, watching their ancestral villages in southern Lebanon literally wiped off the map while being told their grief is politically inconvenient, are not exactly impressed. They point out that Harris already lost Michigan by 80,000 votes after her Israel policy bled at least 100,000 votes, but party elites seem determined to prove that you really can lose the same state the same way twice. While McMorrow solemnly insists that hosting rallies with Piker "fans the flames" after a synagogue attack that Arab Americans also condemned, the actual asymmetry is crystal clear: Israel gets compassion, Arabs get lectures, and corporate-backed Democrats get to pretend this is moral clarity instead of electoral negligence.

Meanwhile, Piker is the same guy the Harris campaign once invited to stream from the 2024 DNC and who’s been praised by Bernie Sanders, but now he’s apparently too radioactive to be in a room with Democrats who take AIPAC checks. Michigan has the largest Arab American population per capita in the country, over a million Lebanese civilians have been displaced, and virtually every Lebanese American family in the state knows someone killed or driven from their home. The party establishment’s response is to treat their pain like a messaging problem to be suppressed, then act shocked when those voters decide they don’t feel like saving the same people who keep telling them to shut up and fall in line.