ice detains canadian mom, proves no immigrant is ‘legal’ enough
Canadian mom and daughter, pictured during the brief period when their family time did not involve fluorescent lights, handcuffs, and ICE paperwork for ‘voluntary’ exile.
Trump’s deportation machine is running so hot it’s now scooping up Canadian moms married to US citizens and locking them up with their autistic kids for the crime of … having their paperwork in process. Tania Warner and her seven-year-old daughter Ayla were driving home from a baby shower in Texas when Border Patrol decided the most American thing to do was disappear them into ICE custody and start the paperwork for “have you considered deporting yourself?”
Warner says agents handcuffed everyone – including children – parked them on thin mats under 24/7 lights, blocked her from calling a lawyer, and relentlessly pushed her to sign “self-deportation” forms. She keeps explaining that she has the correct documents to live and work in the US; the government keeps explaining that under Trump, the only correct document is a one-way ticket out.
After a stint in the notorious McAllen facility, they were moved to the Dilley family prison – a site so bad it was shut down under Biden and then lovingly resurrected in 2025 to warehouse families again. Ayla now has a full-body rash and Benadryl, her mother has a $15,000 bond hanging over her head, and Canada is scrambling to figure out how to get its citizens out of America’s "lawful" kidnapping program. The official Canadian line is that there are “multiple cases” of Canadians in US immigration detention; the unofficial line is: if Trump’s president, stay the hell away from the border and hope the empire doesn’t notice you.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
markwayne mullin puts homeland security in ‘hold my beer’ mode
Markwayne Mullin, moments before being handed the keys to one of the world’s largest security bureaucracies like it’s a CrossFit trophy.
Trump has now sworn in Sen. Markwayne Mullin as Homeland Security Secretary, because when you’re building an authoritarian cosplay cabinet, you naturally hand the domestic security apparatus to the guy best known for trying to start a fistfight in a Senate hearing and bragging about going rogue in Afghanistan. Who needs calm, competent stewardship of DHS when you can get a walking Facebook comments section with subpoena power?
This isn’t just another bad personnel pick; it’s the logical next step in turning DHS into a partisan enforcement arm. A department already infamous for family separation, secret police in unmarked vans, and a Border Patrol that thinks the Geneva Conventions are a suggestion now gets a boss whose brand is performative rage and "tough on the border" soundbites. Expect more photo-op raids, more cruelty packaged as "security," and a lot fewer guardrails.
While NBC runs the swearing-in as a tidy little ceremony clip, the real story is that Trump is stacking the security state with loyalists who see the law as optional and immigrants as props. Mullin doesn’t have to be a policy genius; he just has to obey the guy who wants DHS to function as his personal grievance enforcement squad. Congratulations, America: the agency with the most guns and badges is now being run like a Trump rally meet-and-greet.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#fascism
trump invents 'fraud czar' to hunt fraud, accidentally describes himself
Colin McDonald, soon-to-be fraud enforcer, practices keeping a straight face while pledging independence from the same White House he’ll have a "direct line" to.
Trump’s Senate just signed off on creating a brand-new Justice Department job: assistant attorney general for fraud enforcement, a role that comes with what JD Vance bragged will be a "direct line" to the White House. Nothing screams "independent law enforcement" like wiring Main Justice straight into Trump’s grievance switchboard.
Democrats and former DOJ officials are gently pointing out that, historically, the Justice Department wasn’t supposed to function as the president’s personal oppo-research firm. But the National Fraud Enforcement Division McDonald will run is being stood up right as the White House launches a Vance-chaired, "government-wide" anti-fraud task force that mysteriously focuses on places like Minnesota — a favorite MAGA punching bag lovingly amplified by Trump-aligned influencers.
Officially, this is all about protecting taxpayers from scams in government programs. Unofficially, it’s a ready-made pipeline for turning TikTok talking points into federal indictments. The White House and DOJ, asked how this new division and Vance’s task force will actually work together, had no answers — which is Washington-speak for "however Trump wants, whenever he wants." The "war on fraud" looks a lot less like good governance and a lot more like building a dedicated office to criminalize your political enemies and call it ethics.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
alpha fail: trump makes hooters guy america’s ‘values’ envoy
Nick Adams, freshly promoted from posting Hooters fanfic on X to explaining ‘American values’ to the rest of the planet. The Founders would be thrilled, probably from the bottom of their mass graves.
Trump has appointed Australian-born MAGA thirstposter Nick Adams as “special presidential envoy for tourism, exceptionalism and American values,” because apparently the State Department wasn’t embarrassing enough on its own. The Senate quietly punted on making this guy ambassador to Malaysia after his Islamophobic and pro-Israel-at-all-costs posts sparked protests in Kuala Lumpur, so naturally Trump just created a bespoke envoy role and stapled him to it. Who needs Senate confirmation when you’ve got vibes and a Sharpie?
Adams is best known for LARPing as a cartoon “alpha male” on X: bragging that he goes to Hooters, eats rare steaks, lifts heavy, reads the Bible nightly, and is “pursued by copious amounts of women” – the kind of thing a 13-year-old writes on Reddit before getting grounded. He also boasted about getting a waitress fired for a “Free Palestine” pin, then quietly deleted the post once it clashed with his new cosplay as America’s tourism and values ambassador. Now this guy, whose entire brand is performative grievance and dubious anecdotes, is being sent out to embody “American exceptionalism” for the country’s 250th anniversary.
The White House insists Adams will “showcase and advance America’s excellence across the world stage,” which is a poetic way of saying the administration has outsourced soft power to a manosphere influencer whose main diplomatic experience is harassing waitstaff online. Instead of professionals who understand foreign cultures, Trump is elevating a guy whose earlier comments already ignited backlash in a Muslim-majority nation he was supposed to represent us to. Perfect metaphor for Trump’s America: weaponize bigotry, call it patriotism, slap a title on it, and pretend the rest of the world isn’t watching this clown show in horrified fascination.
#awful-nominations#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
supreme court debates whether a border line is also a moral one (spoiler: no)
Supreme Court justices carefully studying a map of the US-Mexico border to determine the precise location where empathy ceases to apply.
The Trump administration is back in court asking the supreme court to bless "metering," the charming policy where asylum seekers show up at legal border crossings, knock on the door, and the US government says: we see you, we hear you, now go stand in Mexico forever. The legal question: have people "arrived" in the United States when they reach an official port of entry, or do we get to pretend they don't exist as long as one shoe is technically still on the Mexican side of the imaginary line?
Vivek Suri, arguing for the administration, offered the kind of rigorous jurisprudence you'd expect from a government that campaigned on ending asylum altogether: "You can’t arrive in the United States while you’re still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case." Conservative justices, especially Amy Coney Barrett, helpfully workshopped how many molecules of dust you have to cross before the law kicks in, as if refugee protection is a physics problem instead of a statute Congress already wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, apparently the last person in the room who has met a refugee outside of a Federalist Society gala, pointed out the obvious: border agents are letting in workers with permits and everyone else, while telling asylum seekers at the same open gate to wait in a legal purgatory because the government chooses to declare itself "overburdened." The Ninth Circuit previously ruled that the law requires agents to inspect asylum seekers who arrive at designated crossings, even if they haven’t stepped over the line; Trump is begging the high court to overturn that and has already told them he’ll turn metering back on "as soon as" he feels like it.
The court has already greenlit several of Trump’s post-return immigration dreams on an emergency basis — from deporting migrants to countries that aren’t theirs to yanking protection from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans — so the smart money says the asylum system is about to get another constitutional-size hole kicked in it. The ruling is due by June, just in time for summer: beaches, barbecues, and a Supreme Court debate over how finely you can slice geography before human rights disappear.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
border domination guy shocked to discover there are consequences for killing citizens
Gregory Bovino, modeling his "totally not SS, how dare you" coat, explains that the real tragedy is he didn’t get to deport tens of millions more people.
Gregory Bovino, Trump’s former Border Patrol commander-at-large and part-time cosplay SS enthusiast, is riding off into the retirement sunset after overseeing raids so reckless they left two US citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, dead in Minneapolis. His main regret? Not that federal agents killed Americans. No, Chief Border Domination here just wishes he’d nabbed “even more illegal aliens” and gotten to fully execute his plan to deport 100 million people — which is impressive, given that’s several times more than the estimated undocumented population. Math, like basic humanity, is for the weak.
During his exit interview, Bovino proudly defended “turn and burn” high-speed operations designed to hit cities before protesters could show up, boasted about wanting “total border domination,” and dismissed concerns that his tactics might cause fatalities with a casual “It’s possible, yes.” He referred to immigrants as “scum,” “trash,” and “filth,” called migrants “walking zombies,” and reveled in the kind of playground edginess where he insists on saying Barack Hussein Obama. Naturally, the Trump White House picked him to run Operation Metro Surge because he was a “badass” — which here means personally lobbing pepper gas into crowds and getting demoted only after the body count and lawsuits started piling up.
Bovino also stands by his claim that Alex Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement,” despite video showing Pretti unarmed when agents shot him dead. He’s now facing multiple civil-rights lawsuits and an internal investigation for allegedly disparaging a Jewish prosecutor for taking Shabbat off — which he dismisses as lies from “troglodytes,” a bold accusation from a man whose retirement dream is to personally wage vigilante war on coyotes in the Appalachians. After decades of abusing power, violating rights, and helping turn immigration enforcement into a paramilitary culture war, he’s leaving the federal government exactly as he served in it: absolutely sure he’s the hero, and absolutely proving why he should never have had a badge in the first place.
#anti-immigration#lawlessness#killing-democracy
melania trump to ‘empower children,’ presumably by letting her husband deport them
Melania Trump delivers prepared remarks on ‘empowering children’ while the broader Trump project continues empowering book bans, deportations, and generational trauma.
Melania Trump popped up at a global summit to talk about how much she cares about empowering children through education, which is a bold theme for an administration that treated public schools like a hostile foreign power and migrant children like misplaced luggage. Nothing says "fostering the future" quite like presiding over years of family separations, underfunded schools, and book bans while flying to a conference to read warm words off a teleprompter.
This is the Trump era’s favorite magic trick: break the system, then send out a glossy surrogate to give a speech about hope and opportunity. While Melania gently intones about education and children’s potential, her husband’s allies are busy purging school curricula, terrorizing immigrant families, and turning classrooms into culture-war minefields. It’s less a policy agenda than a branding exercise — a soft-focus ad campaign plastered over a government that keeps using kids as props, pawns, and collateral damage.
So yes, Melania Trump is now a global champion for children’s education. And if that feels a bit like putting the Trump Organization in charge of ethics reform, that’s because it is.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
unpaid tsa, fully paid ice: welcome to airport security under trump
A TSA checkpoint staffed by unpaid officers and freshly imported ICE agents, because nothing says ‘aviation security’ like political hostage-taking and on-the-job training at 30,000 feet.
Six weeks into Trump’s second DHS shutdown in six months, TSA workers are back to the classic MAGA workplace model: mandatory labor, optional paychecks. Over 400 officers have quit, thousands more are calling out, and security lines are stretching longer than Trump’s list of unpaid contractors. The people actually trained to detect explosives are pawning belongings to afford gas, while the White House explains this is all somehow the Democrats’ fault.
Instead of, say, paying the workers who keep planes from exploding, Trump has decided to fly in a different kind of chaos: ICE agents, who are still getting paid and are about as qualified for aviation security as Trump is for the Constitution. The union representing TSA points out that ICE officers aren’t trained or certified to spot aviation threats, but who needs specialized instruction when you’ve got vibes and a gun? As AFGE’s Everett Kelley notes, this doesn’t close a security gap; it creates one.
Democrats are refusing to refund DHS until Republicans agree to rein in ICE, which is currently facing accusations of killing two unarmed U.S. citizens and repeatedly ignoring court orders. Senate Republicans floated a compromise to fund everything except ICE and deal with that mess later. Trump, ever the dealmaker, rejected it—and then his DHS and White House mouthpieces went on TV to blame Democrats for the shutdown he just chose to extend. The same administration that refused a bipartisan funding plan is now scolding workers for quitting because they can’t afford rent.
So TSA officers are working a second unpaid stretch in under a year, still paying off loans from the last shutdown, watching fully funded ICE agents stroll into their checkpoints and collect salaries to not know how to read an X-ray machine. It’s a perfect snapshot of Trump’s America: weaponize ICE, destabilize basic public safety, starve frontline workers, and then angrily insist this is all about “keeping our skies safe.”
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
oil markets briefly fooled by trump’s imaginary iran peace talks
Trump explains his detailed Iran peace plan, which appears to consist of vibes, a Sharpie, and whatever Fox segment he half-watched that morning.
Trump strolls out and announces that actually, there are peace talks with Iran now, which is news to Iran, U.S. diplomats, and anyone who has ever seen a map. Oil prices, ever the optimists, twitch downward for a hot second on the assumption that the President of the United States might be tethered to reality.
Then reporters, diplomats, and basic facts show up. Skepticism spreads, experts note that Iran is still firing missiles and not sending fruit baskets, and the market slowly remembers who’s talking: the guy who once declared North Korea denuclearized because he felt like it. Prices "settle" not because peace is at hand, but because traders decide they can’t keep repricing crude every time Trump free-associates about war and peace on television.
So U.S. foreign policy is now a live-action pump-and-dump theater where the Commander-in-Chief ad-libs global stability, oil futures jump, and the rest of the world has to guess whether he’s describing a secret diplomatic breakthrough or just narrating the movie in his head. Meanwhile, actual diplomats are left doing damage control for a president who treats nuclear standoffs like a ratings stunt.
#killing-democracy#national-security#full-stupid
trump deploys ai to do what he does best: crush states, please donors
Trump signs an AI executive order flanked by lobbyists, proving once again that the only intelligence he trusts is artificial and heavily subsidized.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new use for artificial intelligence: as a pretext to kneecap state governments and shower tech barons with regulatory immunity. In December, Trump signed an executive order telling his administration to both sue and financially punish any state that dares regulate AI – even though more than 70% of voters want more AI oversight at both state and federal levels, and Congress already rejected a similar moratorium almost unanimously. When democracy and oligarchs clash, this White House knows exactly which side it’s on.
What’s sold as “innovation policy” is just federal muscle being flexed on behalf of industry lobbyists terrified that someone, somewhere, might ask their algorithms not to ruin people’s lives quite so aggressively. The self-branded MAGA “populist” movement is now openly trading in its blue-collar cosplay for VIP ballroom time with tech moguls, as Trump’s project fuses government power with corporate AI interests and strips states of consumer protections. Local communities across Maryland, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and beyond are revolting against massive, power-hungry data centers, but the administration’s position is clear: if your town doesn’t want to be turned into a GPU furnace, that’s adorable – and irrelevant.
So while voters across red and blue states line up against unchecked AI and its physical sprawl, Trump is busy welding Washington to Big Tech’s wish list and calling it freedom. The supposed populist warrior against elites has managed to turn AI into yet another tool for centralized, top-down punishment of any state that won’t play ball. Regulatory states’ rights? Only when they’re banning books and abortion, not when they’re inconveniencing billionaires.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
self-deportation: the freedom™ trump keeps talking about
Abel looks out over Los Angeles, the city he loves so much he’s leaving it to escape the people allegedly making it ‘great again.’
Abel Ortiz has lived in Los Angeles since he was two months old, built a life, a business, and a community, and yet remains an undocumented ghost in the only country he actually knows. After decades of existing in Trump’s America as a permanent suspect, his big crime is giving haircuts and paying rent, which of course makes him a top priority for the ICE cosplay police.
So under the constant threat of raids, detention, and bureaucratic roulette, Abel does the one thing the nativist brain trust has always fantasized about: he leaves. Not because he’s been deported, not because he’s committed some heinous offense, but because living in endless legal purgatory inside a militarized immigration regime is worse than starting over somewhere that doesn’t treat his existence as a felony. Trump’s America calls this a win for “law and order”; the rest of us recognize it as a man being pressured into self-deportation by a government that’s turned fear into domestic policy.
#anti-immigration#trumps-america
trump slaps sanctions on human rights and calls it freedom
Trump and Marco Rubio bravely defending freedom by sanctioning anyone who talks to the people investigating war crimes.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to defend "Western civilization": financially strangle a UN human rights expert and terrify American academics into silence. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, recommended ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant and suggested maybe – just maybe – companies helping commit war crimes should face consequences. For this unspeakable crime of doing her job, the White House hit her with sanctions so sweeping they amount to a bureaucratic excommunication: no US bank account, no selling her DC house, no salary from American universities. Civil liberties, meet civil death.
The fun doesn’t stop there. Trump signed an executive order threatening criminal prosecution for anyone who provides "funds, goods, or services" to Albanese or Palestinian human rights organizations – language so vague a Maine university canceled an academic conference because she was going to Zoom in for free. Marco Rubio, now playing cosplay Secretary of State, piled on by sanctioning ICC prosecutors, judges, and Palestinian NGOs, because nothing says "land of the free" like punishing people for investigating war crimes and genocide.
The result: professors and students across US campuses are now afraid to share research with Albanese or the ICC, lest they end up fined or arrested for the crime of emailing a PDF. The Supreme Court has spent six decades saying this kind of "chilling effect" on speech is unconstitutional; Trump’s response is to crank the thermostat down to freezer-burn and dare the courts to stop him. Human rights lawyers and academics are filing briefs to challenge the order, arguing that criminalizing contact with a UN expert for criticizing an ally’s atrocities is not exactly what the First Amendment had in mind. But hey, on the bright side, at least we finally know what "free speech absolutism" means in Trump’s America: you’re absolutely free to shut up.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump’s big, beautiful wealth gap
Trump announces a tiny discount on a few drugs while quietly handing the stock market another gift basket from working-class America.
Trump’s economy is doing great — as long as you’re in the top 10% hoarding about 90% of all stocks and responsible for half of U.S. consumer spending. The administration slashed regulations, showered corporations with tax breaks, and watched as seven tech giants turned the stock market into a VIP-only money cannon. Out in the real world, one guy is planning a house addition and not worrying about child care, while his friends are wondering why the “booming economy” never made it past the gated community.
Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff fetish is quietly functioning as a regressive tax on everyone who can’t buy groceries in bulk at Costco with their capital gains. Prices are up, job growth is sputtering, and lower-income workers are discovering that the president who promised to fight for them actually outsourced that job to robots and AI. Wages are slowing, hiring is weak, and people like a 23-year-old optometrist’s assistant in Portland are skipping meals and getting told by official Washington that everything is fine and they’re just imagining the hunger.
To paper over the mess, the White House is hyping a second-term rerun of the first: more tax cuts, more deregulation, and a crackdown on immigration dressed up as a wage plan. Toss in some Trump-branded 50-year mortgages, a handful of selectively cheaper prescription drugs, and a child savings account that only really works if your parents can throw in $5,000 a year, and you’ve got a perfect program: symbolic help for the poor, compounding returns for the rich. As families at the bottom juggle rent, loans, and food, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” makes sure refunds are just large enough to distract from the fact that the entire system is engineered to keep the wealth gap not just wide, but growing.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting
trump nukes the farm economy, offers thoughts, prayers, and $30 billion
A tractor heroically attempting to plant corn while the president turns U.S. farm country into a live-fire test of his economic fan fiction.
Trump’s Iran adventure is going great for one key constituency: fertilizer exporters who aren’t trying to move product through the Strait of Hormuz. For American farmers, though, the war means nitrogen fertilizer prices are exploding, diesel costs are through the roof, and the guy running the country thinks all-caps posts demanding “PASS THE FARM BILL, NOW” count as agricultural policy.
Meanwhile, the administration’s greatest hits are all playing at once in rural America. Deportations have gutted the farm labor force, tariffs helped jack up machinery prices, and Trump’s ongoing pissing contest with China has soybean prices doing a swan dive. Farmers are now choosing what to plant based not on markets or weather, but on which crop will bankrupt them slightly slower. As one economist politely notes, margins are “tight and in some cases negative,” which is economist for "this is a financial tire fire."
To paper over the damage, Trump and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins are bragging about more than $30 billion in direct aid and a fresh $12 billion package to offset the very “temporary trade disruptions and increased production costs” they personally engineered. Farm leaders and even Republican veterans are saying the quiet part out loud: these subsidies look less like policy and more like a reelection strategy with tractors. Break the markets, hand out bailout checks, call it winning. It’s farm policy as protection racket: nice operation you’ve got there, shame if anything…Trump happened to it.
#forever-grifting#trade-war#trumps-america
trump dusts off cold war law to drill california, not iran
Trump’s energy team, seen here trying to convince a federal judge that a 2015 oil spill was actually a patriotic act of national defense.
California AG Rob Bonta is suing the Trump energy department because Energy Secretary Chris Wright apparently read the Defense Production Act and thought, "Ah yes, my do whatever I want button." Using powers handed to him by a Trump executive order, Wright tried to resurrect the long-disputed Sable Offshore pipeline system—shut down after a 2015 spill dumped over 100,000 gallons of crude into the Pacific—as if state law, state court orders, and a federal settlement were just optional side quests.
California is asking a federal court to remind the Trump administration that the constitution still exists and that "national defense" doesn’t mean "let’s reopen the oil leak from hell." The state wants the court to block the restart order and bar DOE from operating the Santa Ynez platform and pipelines under this Cold War cosplay. Meanwhile, Sable Offshore is already bragging about shipping hydrocarbons again and ramping up to 50,000 barrels a day, because why wait for rulings when you’ve got an oil-friendly White House writing you permission slips?
Gavin Newsom helpfully pointed out that Trump literally started a war with Iran, admitted it would spike gas prices, and is now using the crisis he engineered to jam open California’s coastline for his industry buddies. It’s disaster capitalism with extra tar balls: manufacture an international crisis, jack up prices, then scream "energy emergency" while you bulldoze state authority and environmental protections. The administration is also trying to rebrand a pipeline that never leaves California as "interstate," because if the facts don’t fit your power grab, you can always just relabel the map.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
millions of peasants rudely interrupt trump’s monarchy cosplay
Americans rudely declining their assigned role as extras in Trump’s ICE propaganda reel, armed with cardboard, markers, and an outdated belief in democracy.
The Trump administration’s dream of a comfy little elected monarchy keeps running into the same problem: tens of millions of people who stubbornly insist they’re citizens, not subjects. The third nationwide No Kings protests are set to blanket more than 3,000 cities and towns, with organizers expecting what could be the largest protest in US history — all because Donald really, really wants to play Commander-in-Chief and King George III at the same time.
At the center of this round: Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where residents had the absolute nerve to watch ICE operations in their own communities, and were rewarded when federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti for the crime of observing their government. ICE and DHS are now widely described as running a “reign of terror,” which is a fun way of saying the federal government has decided due process is for suckers and accountability is for other countries.
The protests are fueled by a double feature of Trump-era lawlessness: an allegedly illegal war on Iran and a mass deportation campaign at home, all wrapped in criminalization of dissent and attacks on voting rights. Indivisible, 50501, the ACLU, labor, and civil rights groups are coordinating what they insist will be nonviolent, organized resistance — because when the White House is flirting with authoritarianism, someone has to model responsible behavior. While Trump’s people build a police state with ICE and DHS, millions are showing up to remind them that “No Kings” wasn’t supposed to be a controversial concept in a country literally founded on that idea.
So on 28 March, Bernie Sanders, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers, and a few million of their closest friends will gather to do the thing this administration fears most: peaceful, visible, sustained pro-democracy organizing. The White House keeps acting like the constitution is optional; the streets are sending back a very large, very loud second opinion.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump moves to rename kennedy center after his favorite president: himself
The Kennedy Center, seen here moments before being reimagined as a marble-and-gold tribute to one president’s ego and another president’s ghost rolling his eyes.
Conservation and preservation groups are suing to stop Donald Trump from turning the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into the Trump–Kennedy Center, because apparently we’re just stapling his name onto American history like it’s another failed casino. The lawsuit says Trump and his handpicked board are rushing a $250 million "renovation" that will "hastily gut" the place down to its steel studs while blowing off the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and that pesky detail where Congress never actually authorized a Trump-branded architectural vanity project.
The plaintiffs point out that the Kennedy Center is a living memorial to JFK, not a blank canvas for a septuagenarian real-estate critic to test out his "beautiful, beautiful marbles" theory of governance. They’re asking a judge to rule that last year’s $256 million appropriation for repairs and security doesn’t magically include "new structures" and aesthetic makeovers that would make the lobby look like a Palm Beach steakhouse. Meanwhile, the board has already started mucking around with the site, including slapping Trump’s name on the signage before the legal fights are even over, because the first step in any infrastructure project is, of course, branding.
The administration insists this is all about creating the finest performing arts facility in the world, which is an interesting claim from a president whose signature cultural contribution is rage-posting through felony indictments. A federal judge has already had to step in just to let Rep. Joyce Beatty attend (but not vote in) the board meeting that rubber-stamped the two-year closure, while another part of her challenge is still pending. The conservation groups have a simpler request: stop the White House from taking a chisel to the building’s historic fabric just so Trump can add another monument to himself and call it public service.
#killing-democracy#corruption
trump pays a billion dollars to make sure you keep paying more for energy
Trump and oil execs smiling in front of an ocean view, thoughtfully preserved from the horror of wind turbines by a $1 billion taxpayer-funded protection racket.
While a war in Iran sends fossil fuel prices through the roof, the Trump administration has heroically stepped in to… pay nearly $1 billion to a French oil giant to cancel offshore wind projects that would have provided cheaper, domestic power. TotalEnergies agreed to surrender two offshore wind leases off New York and North Carolina, and in return Trump’s Interior Department will kindly reimburse the company the $928 million it paid under Biden. Apparently the only thing this White House hates more than wind turbines is the idea of Americans having affordable, homegrown energy.
Instead of building clean power off the east coast, TotalEnergies will pour that money into four new trains at the Rio Grande LNG plant in Texas, plus more conventional oil and shale gas in the Gulf. So the official US energy policy is now: when a fossil-fuel-driven crisis exposes how risky oil dependency is, immediately double down on… more fossil fuels, and pay handsomely to kneecap alternatives. Offshore projects like Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind are already sending power to the grid, but Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are too busy doing PR for gas exporters at CERAWeek to notice.
Climate advocates point out that this is “political theater,” which is a polite way of saying the administration is lighting public money on fire to score points against an energy source Trump thinks is ugly. After courts blocked his previous attempts to kill already-permitted wind farms, he’s now just cutting billion-dollar checks to make clean energy go away. American consumers get higher bills and more price shocks; TotalEnergies gets reimbursed and a fossil-fuel expansion package; Trump gets to stand on stage and pretend this is about “lowering costs for Americans.” Everyone wins, except the public, the climate, and basic logic.
#corruption#forever-grifting
trump to gop: no laws unless fewer people can vote
Trump, moments before explaining that the only real voter fraud problem is too many people voting against him.
Donald Trump has issued his latest royal decree to the Republican Party: no deals with Democrats unless they jam voter ID into it. Not "fight for better healthcare," not "fix the economy"—the non-negotiable demand is making it harder to cast a ballot. The man who tried to overturn an election is once again explaining, very loudly, that the only acceptable compromise is one where fewer of the wrong people vote.
This isn’t policy, it’s strategy: hold the entire legislative process hostage until you can rig the rules of the next election. Republicans, who swear they love "election integrity," are being told—by the guy with more indictments than coherent sentences—to prioritize voter ID over literally everything else. Governing is optional; voter suppression is mandatory.
So while normal democracies negotiate over budgets and public safety, Trump’s GOP is negotiating over how many hoops Black, brown, young, and poor voters have to jump through to participate in elections at all. Democracy is supposed to be one person, one vote; Trump’s version is more like one party, all the vetoes—until the electorate is sufficiently "managed" to guarantee the right outcomes.
#killing-democracy#fascism
little marco and the $50 million venezuelan turkey
Former Rep. David Rivera explains to reporters that this is all a big misunderstanding and definitely not about $20 million, an encrypted chat, and a very well-kept yacht.
Miami has outdone itself. The federal trial of former GOP Rep. David Rivera — one-time roommate and political Siamese twin of now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio — is underway, featuring allegations that Rivera was basically Maduro’s very well-paid concierge to Trump’s Washington. Prosecutors say Rivera landed a $50 million contract from Venezuela’s state oil machine, then used his Republican Rolodex to try to soften the White House’s "tough" stance on the socialist regime, all while forgetting that pesky register as a foreign agent part.
The operation allegedly ran through an encrypted chat called "MIA" (subtle), where Maduro was "the bus driver," Rep. Pete Sessions was "Sombrero," and millions of dollars were "melons" — because if you’re going to launder money and influence U.S. policy, you might as well talk like you’re in a rejected Netflix narco-comedy. Of the roughly $20 million Rivera actually got, at least $3.75 million reportedly went to maintaining a luxury yacht owned by Raúl Gorrín, the Venezuelan media tycoon later charged with bribing officials. Foreign policy, Trump-era style: democracy promotion via yacht maintenance.
Into this strolls Marco Rubio, dragged onto the witness stand like a reluctant extra in his old roommate’s indictment. He’s not charged, but prosecutors say Rivera considered Rubio the key to unlocking the Trump White House — no Rubio, "no turkey," as Rivera allegedly bragged after a meeting. Rubio got a backchannel to Caracas while the administration raged publicly about Maduro; Rivera allegedly got paid; Gorrín got his boat polished; and U.S. law got treated as a suggestion. It’s a perfect snapshot of Trump-era foreign policy: loud sanctions up front, quiet yacht invoices in the back.
#forever-grifting#corruption#lawlessness
