Team USA lines up for the national anthem, carefully framing the shot so you can’t see the defense contractors just off camera handing out business cards.
The United States is headed into the World Baseball Classic final against Venezuela, a country we’re currently on at least our second type of "engagement" with, depending on whether you count the part where Donald Trump had Nicolás Maduro literally snatched in a military operation. While the war with Iran hums along in the background like a broken White Noise machine at the Pentagon, Team USA has decided its main job is not, say, baseball, but serving as a traveling tribute act to the Forever War.
Instead of goofy dugout dances and espresso-fueled joy like Italy, or the pure chaos energy of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, the US squad has gone full recruitment-poster chic. Players are saluting each other after wins, the manager invited Robert J O’Neill — the ex–Navy SEAL who brags about killing bin Laden and calls men who voted for Kamala Harris his "concubines" — to give a locker room speech, and pitchers Paul Skenes and Griffin Jax talk about "honoring the military" as the core reason they’re here. Manager Mark DeRosa solemnly explains that “that’s why we wear USA across our chest,” which is a bold rebrand of a baseball jersey into a wearable drone strike.
Skenes helpfully sums up the new national ethos: “This is what we do in America. We fight and we win. And that’s our responsibility.” Not "we play," not "we compete" — we fight. On a baseball field. In a global tournament. While our government is literally at war and just abducted another country’s president. Other teams are dancing, kissing cheeks, and enjoying themselves; Team USA is basically running live B-roll for the next Pentagon ad buy. But sure, tell us again how sports and politics should never mix — unless they’re mixing into a nice, smooth, militarized propaganda smoothie.
Trump squints at a blown-up school on a briefing slide and decides it was Iran, because admitting the U.S. fired the Tomahawk would harsh the war vibes.
Trump was told early on that the missile that obliterated an elementary school in Minab might not be American, because CIA analysts initially thought the fins were wrong for a Tomahawk. Within 24 hours, additional video angles showed it was, in fact, a U.S. Tomahawk. The intel community updated the assessment; Trump, naturally, updated nothing. He had already decided Iran did it, told reporters Iran did it, then doubled down at a press conference while admitting it was a Tomahawk — a weapon used by the U.S. and a few allies, but somehow now starring as Iran’s favorite import.
Former intelligence officials are basically begging their successors to treat Trump like a live grenade. One ex-CIA officer says giving him preliminary info is dangerous because he immediately turns it into a "total embarrassment" that you can’t walk back. Translation: if you tell him "we’re not sure yet," he hears "go on TV and declare war." Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s own investigation is finding what reality already knows: the missile was American, the intel was outdated, and the U.S. military fired on a target list built years ago and apparently never fully rechecked, killing at least 175 people, many of them children.
The school had once been part of an IRGC navy compound, but had been converted into a school years ago — a small detail that might have mattered if anyone had bothered to verify the target before launching a cruise missile. Targets are generated through the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and fed into the Maven Smart System, where AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude help assemble massive target lists for war. What could possibly go wrong with a bureaucracy-plus-algorithm kill list that no one fully re-verifies before lighting the fuse? The White House insists, with a perfectly straight face, that "the United States does not target civilians," as if the dead kids of Minab will be comforted by the assurance that they were only collateral in an outdated spreadsheet. America may not "target" civilians, but it sure keeps finding them.
Brendan Carr, pretending the FCC is his personal Ministry of Truth while polishing his Trump lapel pin and pointing at a map of Iran he definitely hasn’t read.
Donald Trump rage-posts on Truth Social about US media covering attacks on American tanker aircraft in Saudi Arabia, and FCC chair Brendan Carr sprints into the comments like a very eager hall monitor promising to yank broadcast licenses for airing what he calls "fake news." For extra groveling, Carr throws in a line about Trump’s "landslide election victory" – because nothing says independent regulator like cosplaying as the campaign’s deputy press secretary with subpoena power.
The problem, besides all of it, is that Carr knows this is legally garbage. He’s spent years trying to turn the FCC into Trump’s personal content-policing squad: going after late-night comedians, talk shows, public broadcasters, and any outlet that hurts Dear Leader’s feelings, all while literally scrubbing the word "independent" from the FCC website. Every time he screams "distortion" or "not in the public interest," it just happens to target someone who wasn’t sufficiently reverent toward the man whose face is on his lapel pin.
And yet, the emptiness of the threats is the point. Station owners don’t want to spend millions fighting the regime’s favorite bootlicker or risk merger delays, so they cave: spike stories, sand down headlines, and quietly decide that maybe they don’t need quite so much reporting on Iran, dead soldiers, or the Trump administration’s total absence of a plan. We’ve already seen this with KCBS in California, where managers killed interviews that might be "anti-Trump" after Carr launched an investigation. The message is simple: cover the war like Pete Hegseth wants, or the FCC may come for your license over a headline Trump doesn’t like.
That’s how you slide from a free press to something that looks a lot more like Iran’s state TV: obedient outlets, patriotic cheerleading, and wall-to-wall propaganda for the supreme leader and his wars. Republicans mostly shrug, Democrats mumble, and Carr keeps road-testing his dream job as programming director for Trump State Television. Freedom of the press dies not with a bang, but with a regulator whining about "treasonous" headlines on social media.
Brian Cole’s family leaving the courthouse, presumably after being informed that "at or near the Capitol" is now a legal defense and not just a GPS description.
Donald Trump’s "law and order" legacy keeps giving, as lawyers for Brian Cole — the man charged with planting pipe bombs near the RNC and DNC on Jan. 5, 2021 — now argue that he’s covered by Trump’s blanket Jan. 6 pardons. They maintain he’s innocent, of course, but also say that if he did it, it was basically a presidentially pre-approved field trip in the sacred name of election grievances.
Cole’s attorney points out that the devices were found on Jan. 6 "at or near" the Capitol and were allegedly motivated by anger over the 2020 election and the certification of the Electoral College. Translation: if you were mad about Trump losing and your alleged terrorism was properly themed for Insurrection Day, welcome to the pardon party. They even compare Cole to other violent Jan. 6 rioters whose sentences Trump erased, arguing that if transporting guns and beating cops is pardon-worthy, hauling alleged explosives to D.C. shouldn’t be a big deal either — especially since these particular devices didn’t actually explode. Low bar, meet presidential standard.
The filing basically contends that Cole’s alleged conduct isn’t some fringe case; it’s the core of what Trump chose to forgive: politically motivated violence tied to the attempt to overturn an election. Federal prosecutors say Cole believed "extreme acts of violence" were justified because those in power "were in charge" — which, under Trump’s new legal theory of governance, appears to be less a red flag and more a résumé line. The White House, shockingly, has not rushed to clarify whether the presidential mercy program was meant to cover would-be bombers too, but the message is already loud and clear: if your rage serves the Dear Leader’s narrative, the rule of law is optional.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research, seen here moments before the administration decides weather forecasting is too woke and should be replaced with Trump’s gut instinct and a Magic 8-Ball.
The Trump administration has apparently decided that if it can’t stop wildfires, hurricanes, and extreme weather, it can at least defund the people who study them. A new lawsuit from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) says the White House is trying to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) — the country’s largest federal climate and weather research lab — as collateral damage in Trump’s personal feud with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. Because nothing says serious national leadership like using hurricane modeling and wildfire forecasting as hostages in your anti-mail-voting revenge tour.
According to the complaint, Trump got mad that Colorado wouldn’t ban mail-in voting or spring a convicted election-tampering county clerk from prison, so the administration allegedly launched a “campaign of punishment and coercion” against the state. That includes trying to break up NCAR, slapping gag orders on scientists so they can’t talk to the public, canceling multimillion-dollar climate adaptation grants, and yanking NCAR’s supercomputing facility out of UCAR’s control. The National Science Foundation even put out a notice basically asking, "Hey, anyone want Boulder’s premier climate campus for some other use?" — as if it’s a strip mall, not critical weather infrastructure.
This is all part of a bigger tantrum, per related lawsuits: moving U.S. Space Command out of Colorado, axing $109 million in transportation funds, and slapping extra SNAP requirements on low-income residents, ostensibly over “fraud” but actually, the state argues, to punish them for not playing along with election denial cosplay. A federal judge already called BS on the SNAP stunt and blocked it. Now UCAR is asking the court to stop the administration from gutting NCAR’s funding, supercomputers, and staff — you know, the 1,400 people who do things like hurricane forecasting, wildfire monitoring, and space weather modeling that protect lives and infrastructure.
UCAR warns that this politically motivated wrecking ball “poses a direct threat to national security, public safety, and economic prosperity,” which is a very polite way of saying: Trump is so obsessed with punishing a blue state over mail ballots and an election-crimes conviction that he’s willing to kneecap America’s top climate and weather lab during an era of historic climate disasters. The message from the administration is clear: fall in line with the Big Lie, or we’ll turn your climate research center into a parking lot and sell the supercomputer for parts.
Trump, a man who treats reading like a contact sport, mocking Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia from behind the Resolute Desk.
Donald Trump, a man who struggles heroically with the English language in every medium known to humankind, has announced that other people’s brain wiring is disqualifying for the presidency. Mocking California Governor Gavin Newsom’s dyslexia, Trump told reporters he’s “all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president,” and declared that presidents “should not have learning disabilities,” while repeatedly calling Newsom “Gavin Newscum” and “dumb” from the Oval Office like a very stable middle-school bully.
The National Center for Learning Disabilities, apparently still laboring under the illusion that the presidency should not be run on eugenics vibes, condemned Trump’s remarks and gently reminded America that dyslexia doesn’t affect intelligence, judgment, or the ability to lead — a list of qualities Trump might want to borrow from someone with a learning disability. Researchers have even suggested that past presidents like George Washington, John F. Kennedy, and Woodrow Wilson may have had dyslexia, which means Trump’s new purity test would have flunked some of the country’s foundational leaders while somehow grandfathering in the guy who can’t spell “Gavin Newsom.”
Newsom, for his part, responded by roasting Trump online and noting that he spoke candidly about his dyslexia — a nuance that Trump translated into “can’t read, has a mental disorder – A Cognitive Mess!” on Truth Social, which continues to function as the world’s least helpful neurological clinic. So we now have a president who bombs children, protects abusers, and openly suggests that tens of millions of Americans are unfit to hold the office he’s currently defiling — but sure, the real problem is the dyslexic guy who doesn’t read speeches off a teleprompter.
Health Secretary RFK Jr bravely defends Americans’ right to wash down their conspiracy theories with a tall glass of E. coli.
The country’s largest raw milk distributor, charmingly named Raw Farm, has been linked by the FDA to a multi-state E. coli O157:H7 outbreak that mostly hit kids three and under, because of course it did. Seven people got sick across California, Florida, and Texas, but the company’s response is to SCREAM IN ALL CAPS that they “100% DISAGREE” with the FDA’s "false possible link" — a phrase that really captures the spiritual core of this administration’s relationship with science. Voluntary recall? That’s for people who don’t believe in rugged individualism and acute kidney failure.
This is the same Raw Farm whose products California had to recall in 2024 after retail samples tested positive for bird flu. So naturally, in the Biden-Trump unity cosplay administration, this is the moment Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr — a man who treats public health like a YouTube comment section — steps in to loudly champion raw milk and pledge support for the farmers selling it. The CEO of Raw Farm, Mark McAfee, proudly notes that RFK Jr is a longtime customer, which is definitely what you want to hear about the cabinet official allegedly in charge of disease prevention, not the hype man for your local pathogen co-op.
The CDC has spent years telling Americans to avoid raw milk because it’s more likely to contain dangerous bacteria. The administration’s response? Put a raw-milk evangelist in charge of federal health policy and let him boost a company already linked to E. coli and bird flu. Regulatory capture used to be about corporations quietly writing the rules behind closed doors; now it’s just the Health Secretary yelling "DRINK UP" while the FDA whispers from the corner that maybe feeding toddlers unpasteurized plague juice is bad.
Supreme Court justices thoughtfully pondering whether fleeing war and disaster is a valid excuse for not being deported immediately.
The Supreme Court has graciously agreed to hear arguments on whether the Trump administration can yank Temporary Protected Status from Haitians and Syrians, because nothing says "land of opportunity" like debating how fast to deport people back to war zones and disaster rubble. For now, the justices are allowing hundreds of thousands to keep living and working legally in the US, like a landlord who hasn’t quite gotten around to changing the locks.
The conservative majority has already greenlit ending protections for 600,000 Venezuelans, but this time the White House wants a deluxe package: a broad ruling that would basically tell lower courts to sit down and shut up whenever DHS decides a country is magically “safe” again. This, despite one court explicitly finding that “hostility to nonwhite immigrants” likely played a role in the decision to target Haitians. The administration, naturally, denies any racial animus, presumably because when you say the quiet part out loud in cabinet meetings, it doesn’t count as evidence.
At stake: protections for at least 356,000 people from Haiti and Syria and the precedent for 1.3 million TPS holders globally. The Justice Department is arguing that DHS has sole, unreviewable power to end these protections — a fun little theory of government where the executive branch gets to play immigration god and the judiciary’s job is to nod politely. Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been methodically terminating TPS for multiple countries since Trump’s encore performance in the Oval Office, turning a humanitarian safeguard into yet another loyalty test for nonwhite immigrants: how badly are you willing to risk death to prove America is still great?
Trump explains a congressman’s private medical file on live TV while the Speaker of the House remembers, too late, that indoor voices exist.
Trump held a White House press conference that was allegedly about the Kennedy Center and Iran, but quickly devolved into a live-action HIPAA violation. Sitting next to Speaker Mike Johnson, he prodded him into discussing Rep. Neal Dunn’s serious health issues and then just blurted out that Dunn had a "terminal" diagnosis and "would be dead by June"—prompting Johnson to mutter the quiet part out loud: "That wasn’t public."
Because nothing says "functioning democracy" like the president using a congressman’s near-death experience as content, Trump went on to specify it was a heart problem and brag that he personally got Dunn in with White House doctors for a "long operation" and "more stents". The subtext wasn’t subtle: your heart may be failing, but your real job is propping up a one-seat Republican majority. Human being with a family becomes expendable vote count with stents installed by the executive branch.
Johnson dutifully cleaned up the mess by assuring everyone that Dunn now has "more energy than a man half his age", like a refurbished congressman fresh off the factory line. Meanwhile Dunn, who has decided not to seek re-election, is offstage while the president casually narrates his medical chart to the nation for political effect. Privacy, dignity, boundaries—quaint concepts from before the era when your personal health status is just another prop in Trump’s ongoing reality show about clinging to power.
Contractors delicately chisel 'John F. Kennedy' off the facade and wedge 'Donald Trump' in, proving that in this administration even the performing arts are getting a tacky rebrand.
The Trump-appointed board of the Kennedy Center has unanimously decided that what America’s premier performing arts venue really needed was a two-year shutdown so it can fully blossom into the Trump Kennedy Center — because of course his name is now on it. President Donald Trump announced that the closure will allow for "high quality, really high quality construction," which is reassuring coming from the guy whose brand is unpaid contractors and collapsing casinos.
Roma Daravi, the center’s VP of PR, dutifully declared that this $250 million project will create a "world-class destination" and a "landmark where every American is welcome" — assuming those Americans are cool with their national arts center becoming a federally subsidized Trump-branded monument with better acoustics. The board also installed Matt Floca as COO and executive director, replacing interim head Richard Grenell, because why have one Trump loyalist when you can rotate the whole casting call?
Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty had to sue just to attend the board meeting of this supposedly national institution. A judge kindly allowed her to sit in the room, but not necessarily vote, turning her into an ex-officio potted plant while the Trump board unanimously rubber-stamped the two-year blackout. So the nation’s flagship performing arts center is now closed for business, open for branding, and run like a family property development deal — artistic excellence, meet authoritarian HOA board.
Susie Wiles at the White House, flanked by officials who see every human event as another exhibit in the Case of Trump v. Reality.
Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff and long-time architect of his political career, has been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and says she’ll keep running the chaos factory while undergoing treatment. On the human level: that’s serious, it’s scary, and like everyone else in that situation, she deserves competent medical care and a full recovery.
Then the Trump White House did what the Trump White House does: turned a private health crisis into branded content for the persecution-industrial complex. Trump hopped onto Truth Social to declare her prognosis “excellent” and assure everyone she’ll be putting in “virtually full time” at the White House, because this administration treats cancer like a minor scheduling inconvenience but climate change like a suggestion.
While most officials managed a basic level of humanity, deputy chief of staff James Blair decided the moment called for some fanfic about the Deep State Cinematic Universe. In a single post, he claimed Wiles had bravely battled through “illegitimate indictments, domestic spying by the former administration, rigged federal prosecutions, illegal law enforcement raids, general lawfare, assassination attempts, & more” — an impressive list of things that are either under criminal investigation, made up, or both. Apparently the message is: your boss is the victim of a vast criminal conspiracy, but also definitely in charge of the country, don’t think too hard about it.
So while Wiles faces a disease that affects one in eight women, the people around her are still laser-focused on the truly important thing: using literally anything — including a cancer diagnosis — to fuel Trump’s narrative that the justice system, the media, and basic reality are all part of an illegitimate plot against him. The prognosis for American democracy remains somewhat less “excellent.”
Gregory Bovino, seen here treating a gas station like a forward operating base, contemplates which constitutional right to ignore next.
Gregory Bovino, the Hollywood-poster-boy of Trump’s immigration crackdown, is finally retiring, presumably to spend more time not testifying under oath. This is the guy who turned Chicago, L.A., Minneapolis, New Orleans, Charlotte and random Home Depot parking lots into his personal cosplay of a junta, then got demoted after two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ended up dead at the hands of federal officers during his Minneapolis fun run known as Operation Metro Surge.
While serving as CBP commander at large and reporting directly to Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski (a sentence that already screams "constitutional crisis"), Bovino got famous for throwing gas canisters into crowds of protesters and using chemical agents in residential neighborhoods, even after a federal judge told him to knock it off. The same judge later dragged him back into court for repeatedly lying about supposed threats from immigrants and protesters, including a rock-throwing story that collapsed the second video evidence showed up. Shockingly, the rule of law did not thrive under the guy who treated perjury like a management style.
Before Minneapolis, Bovino was busy in Los Angeles staging workplace and residential raids, popping agents out of a rental truck in a Home Depot parking lot to grab day laborers, and sparking five days of protests so intense that Trump sent in the National Guard and Marines like he was rebooting "Fallujah: The Prequel." He’d already been sued in Kern County for tactics including pulling people from cars, slashing tires, racially profiling, and using trickery to push people out of the country — conduct that DHS blandly described as "highly targeted" enforcement while insisting any misconduct is immediately investigated. Apparently the investigation process ends with a retirement party and a full pension.
So now Bovino quietly exits one year before mandatory retirement, after years of gas, lies, lawsuits, dead citizens, and open contempt for court orders. No accountability, no admissions, just a gentle glide into the federal retirement system. The Trump administration keeps insisting it’s all about law and order; they just forgot to mention that the law is optional and the order is enforced with tear gas and fiction.
Community volunteers patrolling Chinatown because the federal government outsourced public safety to vigilante grandkids while the president workshopped new racial slurs on Twitter.
Trump spent 2020 workshopping racial slurs on live TV, calling Covid the “Chinese virus” and turning Asian Americans into walking bullseyes. Shockingly, when the president of the United States spends months doing open-mic racism at the podium, people start getting spat on, beaten in the street, and, in Atlanta, murdered. Out of that carnage came Stop Asian Hate, which documented nearly 13,000 incidents, pushed real money into victim support and education, and even got Asian American history into public school curricula — a radical move in a country where any non-white history is now treated as Marxist witchcraft.
The movement managed to “galvanize political power” just long enough for the media to get bored and for the usual centrist brains to decide racism was a 2021 fad. Inside the AAPI community, younger organizers pushed for community-based safety while older elites reached for the classic American solution: more cops, more task forces, more carceral theater. NYPD rolled out an Asian hate crimes task force, celebrities offered cash rewards, and progressive organizers pointed out that putting bounties on Black and Brown men wasn’t exactly the solidarity arc they had in mind.
Now we’re in Trump’s second, even more aggressively anti-immigrant administration, where the guy who helped supercharge anti-Asian hate is back in charge and doubling down on xenophobic rhetoric while pretending he’s the real victim. The Stop Asian Hate “moment” has faded, but the policies and the backlash he spawned are still here, colliding with a government that treats immigrants as a problem to be punished, not people to be protected. The movement is at a crossroads; Trumpism is not. It’s marching confidently forward, screaming slurs into a megaphone and calling it border security.
Scene from Oakland, the city Trump swore was beyond saving, stubbornly refusing to collapse for his next law-and-order press conference.
Donald Trump spent the summer of 2025 fantasizing about sending the National Guard into Democratic cities like it was his own personal cosplay of martial law, declaring places like Oakland "so far gone" they were basically write-offs. Minor plot twist: while he was on camera doing his best dystopian voiceover, Oakland was quietly recording its lowest homicide total in 25 years, cutting murders in half from their 2021 peak without needing tanks, tear gas, or a presidential tantrum.
Instead of federal stormtroopers, the city relied on boring, un-televised things: community groups like Urban Peace Movement, investment in neglected neighborhoods, coordination between local departments, and actual relationships with the people most at risk of violence. So naturally, the Trump administration is now lunging for credit, pointing to its immigration crackdowns and "tough on crime" theatrics while Oakland leaders politely note that federal meddling has mostly made things worse. Reality: local organizers, residents, and some cops doing the slow, grinding work of prevention. Narrative from DC: "We scared everybody straight with fascist vibes, you're welcome."
None of this means Oakland is a utopia – East and West Oakland still bear the brunt of shootings, and one mass shooting can erase a year’s worth of feel-good graphs for the families living through it. But the city’s experience blows up Trump’s favorite campaign B‑roll of "Democrat-run hellholes" and replaces it with something far less useful to him: a story about communities reducing violence with resources, not crackdowns; cooperation, not occupation. No wonder he keeps pretending it’s a war zone. Peace is terrible for the brand.
Nothing says “stability in the Middle East” like pointing expensive flying gas tanks at someone else’s oil infrastructure.
The U.S. has reportedly sent jet fighters to hit Iran’s Kharg Island oil facilities, because if there’s one thing Washington can’t resist, it’s rolling the dice on global energy markets while reassuring everyone this is totally “limited” and “proportional.” As Iran ramps up strikes across the Middle East, the administration’s answer is to start poking the part of Iran’s economy labeled DO NOT TOUCH UNLESS YOU’RE TRYING TO START SOMETHING BIG.
Officials will no doubt insist this is a “clear message” and not, say, an undeclared escalation that could drag the region into another disastrous conflict. Congress, naturally, will continue its longstanding tradition of watching presidents play real-time Risk with U.S. forces and foreign civilians while bravely issuing sternly worded press releases. Call it the War Powers Act, but make it decorative.
So now we’re in the fun phase where Iran hits targets across the region, the U.S. hits Iran’s oil lifeline, and everyone pretends this isn’t edging closer to a direct war that nobody voted on and nobody can afford. American troops and Middle Eastern civilians get to be the chips on the table, while the White House and its forever-hawk cheering section congratulate themselves on their "strength" and then act stunned when the blowback arrives right on schedule.
Aipac’s latest innovation: influence-peddling so unpopular it has to show up wearing a fake mustache and calling itself “Affordable Chicago Now.”
Aipac, the lobby that spent decades insisting it was just the voice of bipartisan common sense, is now shoveling at least $13.7 million through Super PACs with names like "Elect Chicago Women" and "Affordable Chicago Now"—which is a bold rebrand for "We Definitely Don’t Want You to Know This Is About Israel." The ads never mention Israel, Gaza, or even foreign policy, because nothing says "confident in our cause" like hiding behind generic civic virtue and a P.O. box.
The donor patterns look like they were generated by a bored intern with an Excel macro: the same Aipac-aligned donors cutting identical checks to three different House candidates, sometimes on the same day, while the Super PACs conveniently won’t reveal their funders until on or around election day. Meanwhile, Democratic voters have moved sharply toward sympathy with Palestinians and against endless war, so the Aipac brand has become so toxic that even its own beneficiaries are now denouncing Trump’s Iran strikes as "dangerous," "unconstitutional," and evidence he has "lost his mind"—while still quietly courting the same money they claim to find appalling.
The result is a farce where Aipac praises Trump’s bombing of Iran, but its chosen Democrats in Illinois sprint away from the war like it’s on fire, and some of them publicly beg their shadowy backers to reveal their donors and "hit a wall." In one heavily Jewish district, the Aipac-aligned hit jobs on a mildly critical, pro-Israel mayor may well boost a Palestinian American progressive to Congress instead. It’s a masterclass in how to spend tens of millions of dollars to prove that your influence is still enormous, your judgment is terrible, and your political touch is about as subtle as Trump’s foreign policy.
Thom Tillis and Adam Schiff pretend this is a normal oversight hearing and not an annual review for an administration that keeps accidentally killing its own citizens.
Thom Tillis has entered his ‘say the quiet part out loud’ phase of retirement, and the target list is getting interesting. He torched Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem over her little "immigration agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis" problem and called her tenure a "disaster" before Trump finally fired her. You know things are going great when the internal performance review for DHS is: "Your deportation death squad is creating bad optics, ma’am."
Freed from the terror of a Trump-backed primary, Tillis is suddenly auditioning for the role of conscience of the Senate GOP – while still insisting he wants Trump to go down as the most successful Republican president in history. So he’s blasting Stephen Miller, blocking Kevin Warsh’s nomination to the Fed over a sketchy justice department investigation into Jerome Powell, and generally running around the Capitol like a middle manager who just realized the company is committing crimes on the conference call.
Democrats, naturally, are thrilled to have a Republican who occasionally acknowledges reality, because they need his North Carolina seat to flip the Senate. Tillis, naturally, insists he’s doing all this to help Trump by steering him away from the worst advice. The plan, apparently, is to salvage American democracy by politely fact-checking the guy who built a cult of personality, unleashed a mass deportation regime, and keeps firing people after their policies get citizens killed. Bold strategy.
A Swing Left volunteer attempts the most radical experiment in modern U.S. politics: asking a voter what they actually think before demanding their soul and their Tuesday.
New NBC polling confirms a stunning development: in the grand American trust Olympics, Donald Trump, ICE, and a late medieval pope all beat the Democratic party. When you’re losing to a 13th-century pontiff and the deportation police, it might be time to admit the vibes are off.
Swing Left, a grassroots group born from the 2016 “oh God what have we done” moment, has decided that maybe the way to fix a system everyone thinks is rigged is to talk to people before they’re standing in a voting booth. Instead of the usual last-minute, data-bro drive‑by texts and app scripts that boil human beings down to a 1–5 scale, they’re doing “deep canvassing” — actual conversations, at actual doors, with actual humans. Then they feed those messy, real-world feelings into AI, which is now apparently the only thing in American politics expected to listen.
The Federal Election Commission helpfully joined the fun in 2024 by blessing direct coordination between federal candidates and outside groups on paid canvassing, allowing outfits like Swing Left to build full-blown campaigns-in-waiting for when candidates finally show up with a slogan and a merch store. So now we have a system where the parties are distrusted, the voters think the system is broken, and the solution is to outsource listening to a nonprofit that outsources comprehension to a large language model. Democracy: now with extra middleware.
From Kingston, New York, the message coming back is painfully consistent: people feel the country is too divided, they’re choosing between the “lesser of two evils,” and the whole thing is rigged against working people who are just trying to wake up, go to work, and pay bills that keep getting bigger. Or, put more simply: after Trump, Biden, and a decade of institutional face‑plants, voters are finally saying out loud what the political class has spent years pretending not to hear — the system is broken. The question is whether talking to them a few months earlier and transcribing their despair into an app will fix it, or just give us much higher‑resolution data on the collapse.
Behold the cutting edge of U.S. national defense: a rusting fence, a warning sign, and a DOJ pretending desperate migrants are 1909-era saboteurs casing an arsenal.
The second Trump administration has decided that if you can’t run an immigration system, you can at least cosplay a military junta. Trump declared a border “national defense area,” handed it to the Pentagon, and his DOJ promptly started charging migrants not just with illegal entry, but with trespassing on military property under a law originally meant to keep spies away from ammo depots. Jose Omar Flores-Penaloza admitted he crossed illegally and was ready to be deported, but prosecutors insisted on branding him a quasi–national security threat for walking through a patch of desert he didn’t even know had been magically converted into Fort MAGA.
Courts, inconveniently for the strongman aesthetic, keep pointing out that you generally need mens rea — a guilty mind — to convict someone of trespassing, and that 4,700 migrants do not become enemy agents just because Donald Trump signed a paper and slapped "national defense" on some scrubland. At least nine judges in West Texas and New Mexico have found the cases legally deficient, and about 60% of the trespass charges have been dropped or dismissed. Yet DOJ keeps filing them anyway and appealing the losses, because the point isn’t law enforcement, it’s punishment and deterrence by process: keep people in jail, flood the courts, and dare the judiciary to stop them.
Meanwhile, habeas petitions from immigration detainees are at record highs, and even government attorneys are melting down in court — one literally telling a Minnesota judge, “The system sucks. This job sucks.” That’s the sound of a legal system being repurposed from administering justice to running a glorified intimidation campaign at the border. National emergency apparently now means “we’ll resurrect a century-old anti-spy statute, ignore basic criminal law principles, and see how much authoritarian theater the courts will tolerate.”
Senate Republicans prepare to defend democracy by making sure fewer people can participate in it.
Senate Republicans are gearing up to rubber-stamp the so-called SAVE America Act, a voting "overhaul" that just happens to be Donald Trump’s top priority. When a twice-impeached, coup-curious ex-president obsessed with imaginary voter fraud wants to "fix" elections, you don’t need a law degree to guess who’s getting saved and who’s getting quietly thrown off the voter rolls.
NPR politely calls it a "controversial" bill, which is one way to describe a Trump-backed scheme to reengineer how Americans vote after he spent years insisting any election he doesn’t win is illegitimate. Republicans in the Senate, having learned precisely nothing from January 6 except that accountability is optional, are lining up to help him rewire the system so future defeats can be prevented at the application stage. Why persuade voters when you can just redesign the electorate?
The details aren’t in this snippet, but we all know the franchise-by-a-thousand-papers routine: more hurdles, more red tape, more hoops, all carefully branded as "security" and "integrity" while functioning as a loyalty test to Trumpism. The SAVE America Act isn’t about saving America; it’s about saving Trump from the terrifying prospect of a fair vote count.
