trump administration heroically defends cancer’s right to roam free
EPA headquarters, where ‘environmental protection’ has been rebranded as ‘please don’t harsh industry’s carcinogenic vibe.’
The Trump EPA has discovered an exciting new legal theory: if the Clean Air Act doesn’t explicitly say you can protect people from a known carcinogen again after new science shows it’s 60 times worse than you thought, then obviously you’re legally obligated to shrug and let the cancer gas flow. The administration is moving to rescind Biden’s 2024 ethylene oxide (EtO) rule that would’ve cut emissions by about 90% from 89 facilities, protecting some 2.3 million people, mostly in low-income neighborhoods. On the plus side, it would save industry a whopping $47 million a year, which is apparently the going price for mass involuntary participation in a long-term toxicology experiment.
This isn’t just about one chemical; it’s a blueprint for kneecapping the EPA’s ability to ever tighten hazardous air rules when science discovers that, surprise, breathing poison is bad. Harvard analysts note the Trump EPA is arguing that statutory silence means the agency can’t do additional health-based reviews, locking in a future where the government is legally blindfolded while industry sprays whatever it wants. As a bonus, Trump is dusting off a never-before-used “national security / technology not available” exemption to free about half of all commercial medical sterilizers from EtO standards—without providing evidence that the exemption is needed, or that the technology doesn’t exist, or that national security now depends on super-carcinogenic pacemaker sterilization.
NRDC and others are suing, because someone has to object when the president uses obscure legal provisions to exempt chemical plants from hazardous air pollutant rules and then forgets to bring facts. Public health experts call it a broad strategy to gut cancer protections; the Trump team calls it Tuesday. The EPA has even stopped calculating the costs of increased cancer, which is one way to make the numbers look good: if you don’t count the bodies, the policy is practically a miracle of efficiency.
#killing-democracy#anti-science
trump 2.0 proves you can deport workers, but you can’t deport math
ICE agents politely asking the economy to collapse on command so Trump can win another news cycle.
The Trump 2.0 brain trust has once again gone to war with reality and, regrettably for them, reality keeps better records. NPR walks through new research on the administration’s beefed-up ICE raids — the ones that turned places like Chicago’s Little Village from bustling neighborhoods into economic haunted houses where everyone’s too afraid to go to work, shop, or even leave the house. The promise was simple: terrorize undocumented workers, and suddenly American-born workers will be showered with jobs. The actual result? A whole lot of fear, empty storefronts, and fewer job prospects for the very working-class men Trump claims to champion.
Economists Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox looked at the data from Trump’s mass deportations and found the thing every non-Fox-watching human already suspected: no boost in employment for U.S.-born workers, and in many cases, it got worse — especially in industries that rely on undocumented labor, like construction. When you rip out the people who actually keep the economy running, the economy does not, in fact, clap harder and grow; it stumbles. Turns out labor markets aren’t a MAGA Thunderdome where if you deport one immigrant, a white guy in a hard hat magically spawns a job. They’re more like a potluck: fewer people at the table means less food, less growth, and less for everyone.
So while Trump rants about protecting American workers, his immigration crackdown is quietly kneecapping them — shrinking local economies, scaring off customers, and undercutting the very jobs he swore he’d save. It’s a perfect Trump policy trifecta: cruel, useless, and economically self-destructive, sold to his base as a win while the data screams, "you’re getting robbed." Yet again, the administration proves its core governing philosophy: if it feels punitive enough, who cares if it works.
#anti-immigration#trumps-america#full-stupid
the fda discovers a bold new treatment: suppressing its own science
FDA headquarters, where scientific manuscripts go to peer review, get accepted, and then are quietly escorted to the same farm upstate where your childhood dog went.
The FDA commissioned massive vaccine safety studies on nearly 12 million people, got the answers, had them peer-reviewed and accepted by journals, and then political appointees essentially said: "thanks, now bury it." One Covid study found basically one serious signal — anaphylaxis at about one in a million Pfizer doses — and another confirmed already-known rare risks like febrile seizures and myocarditis. A Shingrix study confirmed a small uptick in Guillain-Barré risk that's literally been on the label for years. So naturally, the response from leadership was to yank the manuscripts rather than let doctors or the public see reassuring data. Science, but make it hostage negotiation.
The best part? While these big, well-designed studies get blocked for being too reassuring, an internal memo linking 10 child deaths to Covid vaccination — with no substantiated evidence — sails right through and becomes headline fodder. So fear-driven, weakly supported claims get a red carpet, while robust data that might calm people down is held to a standard no paper on Earth could meet. That’s not caution, that’s regulatory capture with a side of propaganda.
All of this is happening just in time for the World Cup to dump millions of humans into under-vaccinated North America during a measles resurgence, while CDC hemorrhages staff and has its flagship journal and dashboards politically edited like they’re campaign ads. Doctors on the front lines are now stuck practicing medicine in a fun new game called "guess what data the government decided you’re not mature enough to see this week." Public health used to mean "tell clinicians what you see." The new model is closer to "tell them what polls well and hide the rest." What could possibly go wrong at a mass international gathering in the middle of multiple outbreaks when the surveillance system is busy muzzling itself?
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
europe discovers it doesn’t actually have to simp for trump
Donald Trump staring at a map of Europe like it’s a real estate brochure, wondering which NATO member comes with a golf course.
Europe has finally clocked that Donald Trump is less all-powerful God-Emperor and more loud landlord with a foreclosure notice. German chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly says Trump’s Iran war has no exit strategy and that Tehran has "humiliated" the US, which is diplomatic code for "this guy has no idea what he’s doing." Macron, Starmer, and even Giorgia Meloni are now treating Trump like what he is: a security risk with nuclear codes.
Trump and JD Vance tried to rig vibes in Hungary for Viktor Orbán and face-planted, then floated the idea of buying Greenland again, because why stop at bankrupt casinos when you can move on to NATO allies. Europe noticed that the US actually needs European bases for its Iran misadventure, that Ukraine is now mostly funded and armed by Europe and Ukraine itself, and that a lot of Trump’s chest-thumping gets kneecapped by courts, Congress, and his own Maga clown car. Translation: the leverage isn’t what it used to be.
So the EU is sharpening the knives. If Trump slaps higher tariffs on European cars, Brussels has a €93bn retaliation package ready to go, plus an "anti-coercion instrument" aimed at US hi-tech companies for when the Greenland land-grab fantasy inevitably returns. Europe is pouring more money into its own arms industry, "de-risking" from US defense and digital services, and discovering that standing up to Trump actually boosts their poll numbers. Turns out the aura of invincibility fades once everyone realizes the strongman can’t even successfully bully Hungary.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
failed arizona governor, failed senator, successful democracy arsonist heads to jamaica
Kari Lake, seen here auditioning for the role of Ambassador to Whatever Country Trump Hasn’t Alienated Yet.
Kari Lake, the Arizona election-denier who keeps losing races but never concedes them, is being promoted to US ambassador to Jamaica after overseeing the slow-motion demolition of Voice of America. After using an executive order as a pink-slip machine to fire hundreds at VOA and gut US-funded independent journalism, she’s now being rewarded with a diplomatic beach posting. In Trump World, sabotaging a 1942-founded global news service is just another line on the résumé.
The White House insists Lake knows Jamaica "very well" and she promises to "advance America's interests abroad", which, judging by her track record, means exporting the cutting-edge American innovation of never accepting election results. The woman who sued to overturn her own gubernatorial loss and got sued for defamation over her fraud fantasies is now the face of US diplomacy in a Black-majority democracy. What could possibly go wrong.
Meanwhile, Trump has re-nominated Cameron Hamilton to run FEMA, the same guy he booted a year ago for defending the agency when the administration floated shutting it down. FEMA is currently staggering out of a 75-day DHS shutdown and a mass staff exodus, so naturally the plan is to reinstall the one person who mildly resisted its execution. The Trump administration continues its governing philosophy: break institutions, punish anyone who tries to save them, and promote the people who light the matches.
#awful-nominations#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump admin discovers conservation is bad for business, promptly kills it
Doug Burgum proudly stands in front of America’s public lands, helpfully explaining which parts will be drilled, mined, logged, or grazed first once they’re done canceling that pesky ‘conservation’ nonsense.
The Trump Interior Department has decided that conserving public land is too radical a use of public land, so they’re canceling a Biden-era rule that dared to treat conservation as being on equal footing with drilling, mining, logging, and grazing. The 2024 rule finally let people lease land to actually restore it, the way oil companies lease it to strip it, which was apparently a bridge too far for Secretary Doug Burgum and his friends in the “turn everything into a strip mine” caucus.
Instead, the administration is returning the Bureau of Land Management to its historical mission: acting as a concierge service for fossil fuel and timber companies. Industry groups complained that letting anyone pay money to heal land was “non-use” and a betrayal of the sacred “multiple use” doctrine, which in practice has always meant one use: extract every ounce of value now and send taxpayers the cleanup bill later. Environmental advocates point out that this will mean less protection for drinking water, endangered species, and any landscape that isn’t already a moonscape — so, obviously, it had to go.
The repeal slots neatly into Trump’s broader project of turning western public lands into a corporate clearance sale: more oil and gas from taxpayer property, fewer constraints on trashing ecosystems, and even some kneecapping of renewable projects for good measure. Republicans in Congress are doing their part by shredding land management plans that limited development in Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota. The message is clear: if it’s underground and can be burned, blasted, or bulldozed for profit, the federal government is open for business — and if you wanted clean water or intact wildlife habitat, you really should’ve been born a petroleum association.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump threatens to invade nato ally, gets… three bases and a cookie
Vice-President JD Vance inspects Greenland, presumably checking how hard it would be to "own" it without calling it an invasion on the paperwork.
Trump announced in January that the US should "own" Greenland and that it could happen the "easy way" or the "hard way"—which is a charming way to describe threatening a NATO ally with invasion like it’s a mob shakedown for an ice-covered protection racket. Months later, the administration is now in "professional" closed-door talks with Denmark and Greenland to open up to three new US bases in southern Greenland, some of which Washington wants designated as US sovereign territory. Colonialism is back, and this time it’s wearing a red hat and asking nicely only because the lawyers got nervous.
Negotiations are being run by State Department official Michael Needham, whose job description appears to be: "convert the president’s televised war fantasies into something that doesn’t trigger Article 5." Denmark and Greenland are trying to frame this as normal alliance cooperation, while everyone quietly pretends the whole "we could just seize it" thing never happened. Meanwhile, Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Governor Jeff Landry, has been completely sidelined, because apparently even this White House has some threshold for useless cosplay tough guys.
All this is supposedly about countering Russia and China in the GIUK Gap, which is a real strategic concern, but US officials themselves admit they could have gotten a base deal without threatening an invasion. Instead, the administration went with the "hostile takeover" pitch first, then circled back to diplomacy when that proved unpopular with, you know, every other democracy involved. The end result: a NATO ally gets bullied, US militarization in the Arctic quietly expands, and Trump still gets to brag that he "won" Greenland without technically annexing it—yet.
#imperialism#national-security#killing-democracy
trump’s doj declares war on seashells
The offending contraband: a deadly arrangement of seashells that somehow survived two world wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror, but not Donald Trump’s ego.
The Trump administration has now reached the ‘prosecute a beach photo’ stage of authoritarian decline. James Comey has been indicted again, this time because he posted an Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “8647,” which Trump’s Justice Department insists is a “serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” America: where free speech is protected, unless a retired FBI director offends the guy who still rage-posts in all caps.
Comey, whose family members have already been pushed out of federal prosecutor jobs after criticizing Trump, calls this exactly what it is: retaliation from a president with a “bottomless desire” for revenge. The case was cooked up by a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney and a newly hired GOP operative-turned-AUSA, then wrapped in outdated "reasonable recipient" threat language that ignores current Supreme Court precedent requiring actual intent to threaten. Legal experts across the spectrum are politely screaming that the case is built on sand while the administration stares at a seashell arrangement like it’s the Zapruder film.
The indictment follows a previous Comey case that collapsed after a judge ruled Trump’s handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was improperly appointed. Having learned absolutely nothing, the administration has simply tried again with a new batch of loyalists and an even dumber theory. Comey’s lawyers say they’ll move to dismiss the case as selective and vindictive prosecution, while warning that the country is going numb to this level of DOJ abuse. When criminal law is reduced to decoding restaurant slang in beach art, you’re not just off the rails—you’ve melted down the rails and indicted them too.
Meanwhile, the White House has no comment, presumably because it’s busy reviewing other dangerous threats to the presidency, such as crossword puzzles that spell "RESIGN" and latte foam that looks like the 14th Amendment. This is not normal. It is, however, extremely on brand.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
congress contemplates billion-dollar taxpayer tip for trump’s dance floor
Concept art of Trump’s ‘East Wing Modernization Project,’ also known as: you paid for this so he can have nicer parties.
Republicans rolled out a $72 billion "law and order" bill for ICE and Border Patrol, and whoops, look at that — there’s a $1 billion line item for "security adjustments" to Trump’s brand-new East Wing vanity project, also known in English as his ballroom. The word "ballroom" never appears in the bill, because when you’re trying to get working families to underwrite the president’s party bunker, you go with something more respectable-sounding, like "East Wing Modernization Project."
Democrats, smelling political blood and stale caviar, are branding the GOP as "Ballroom Republicans" and promising Byrd Rule challenges to knock out the non-budgetary goodies. Polls already show most Americans hate the idea of bulldozing the East Wing for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ego chamber, and that’s before you mention that taxpayers are now being drafted as unwilling event sponsors. This is especially awkward given Trump previously vowed the whole thing would be privately funded — a promise that aged about as well as every other Trump "I’ll pay for it myself" pledge.
Even some Republicans like Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, and Rand Paul are pretending to be fiscally conscious for a news cycle, questioning why the public should fund Trump’s dance palace. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune is on the floor screaming that Democrats are "defund the police" extremists for not swallowing the entire package, carefully forgetting to mention the billion-dollar ballroom rider. The sales pitch is simple: vote to shovel cash into Trump’s personal prestige project or you’re anti-cop. It’s not a border bill so much as a forever-grifting omnibus with ICE funding as camouflage and a golden conga line straight into Trump’s pocket.
#forever-grifting#corruption
supreme court speedruns minority rule while virginia begs for a map
The Supreme Court, seen here carefully weighing whether voters or Republican cartographers should pick Congress for the next decade.
Virginia Democrats are now reduced to asking the same US supreme court that helped gut the Voting Rights Act to please, sir, may we have a functioning democracy. After voters in April actually approved a Democratic-backed ballot measure to redraw the state’s congressional map and flip four GOP seats, the Virginia supreme court swooped in on 8 May and declared that, sorry, the procedure was wrong, so the will of the voters will just have to wait behind Republican control of Congress.
The Republican lawsuit won on a neat little technicality: Democrats "rushed" the referendum last year, so obviously the only fair solution is to keep the GOP-friendly map that just happens to preserve their narrow House majority. Now Don Scott and Virginia Democrats are telling the US supreme court that the state ruling has "deprived voters, candidates, and the Commonwealth" of their lawfully enacted map, citing a 2023 decision warning state courts not to grab power from legislatures. The twist: that same conservative 6–3 court already paved the road for this mess by gutting a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, letting Republican-led southern states dismantle majority-Black and Latino districts.
Meanwhile, Trump has been egging on Texas Republicans to tear up their maps mid-decade to flip up to five Democratic seats red, which the Guardian politely calls a "tit-for-tat" battle. One side dismantles civil rights protections and hardwires minority rule; the other tries a voter-approved ballot measure and gets slapped down for moving too fast. American democracy is now a game of "who can redraw the lines faster" while the Supreme Court stands by as the nation’s most powerful cartographer, busy turning representative government into an advanced gerrymandering practicum.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump backs gas tax holiday, offers america a coupon while torching the store
Trump explains his new economic plan: blow a hole in the highway fund and hope voters don’t notice the bridge collapsing until after November.
Donald Trump has discovered a bold new economic strategy: take a chainsaw to the Highway Trust Fund and call it a “win for the American people.” He told reporters he’d support suspending the federal gas tax — about 18 cents a gallon — “until it’s appropriate,” which is a very normal way to describe defunding road and transit programs in the middle of a global crisis and a war-driven energy shock.
Congress, naturally, is sprinting to the bad idea buffet. Democrats already rolled out a gas tax holiday bill in March, Republicans like Josh Hawley and Anna Paulina Luna are racing to slap their own names on the same gimmick, and everyone’s pretending this is some grand populist breakthrough instead of a glorified rebate coupon. The Bipartisan Policy Center notes that even if they do it, consumers might see only 10–16 cents of relief while gasoline suppliers quietly pocket the rest — but sure, let’s blow a multi-billion-dollar hole in infrastructure funding so Exxon can find another gold-plated conference room.
Meanwhile, the federal gas tax is what keeps the Highway Trust Fund alive — you know, the thing that pays for highways and mass transit so the country doesn’t literally crumble. A five-month suspension could strip billions from that fund this fiscal year, but that’s a future problem, and Washington’s favorite party trick is looting tomorrow’s budgets to buy today’s talking points. Gas is averaging $4.52 a gallon thanks to the Iran war, and Trump’s big move is to weaken long-term transportation funding so politicians can film campaign ads at gas stations bragging about shaving a dime off the price of a gallon. Peak American governance.
#money#full-stupid
white house correspondents’ dinner gets the full banana-republic treatment
White House Correspondents’ Dinner guests crouch under tables as America’s political system does the same.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner — traditionally a night of bad jokes and worse access journalism — has now upgraded to live-fire exercise. Cole Tomas Allen, a California teacher and engineer, pleaded not guilty to four federal counts, including attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump, after allegedly sprinting toward the event with multiple guns, knives, and enough gear to cosplay "tactical midlife crisis". A Secret Service officer was shot in the chest but survived thanks to a ballistic vest, which is more than you can say for the illusion that this is a stable democracy.
Prosecutors say Allen traveled cross-country by train, checked into the hotel, took a selfie in his murder outfit, and sent his family a manifesto apologizing and ranting about Trump and "administration officials" as targets. So yes, the country is now at the stage where people are openly workshopping assassination plans like they're pitching a startup. Meanwhile, his sister says he made radical comments and talked about a plan to "fix the world" while secretly stockpiling guns — because nothing screams "functional system" like a guy with clear issues gliding through the background-check universe.
The legal circus is just getting started. Allen’s defense team is already moving to bounce the entire U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. from the case because it’s overseen by none other than U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who apparently has a "supervisory role" in the prosecution. So the attempted assassination of Trump is being overseen by Trump-world’s favorite screaming TV judge, and we’re all supposed to pretend that sounds normal and impartial. The only thing missing at this point is a commemorative coin and a Truth Social promo code.
Allen didn’t expect to survive, told the FBI as much, and landed briefly on suicide watch — which is what passes for a coherent endgame in a political environment where everything is permanently set to "escalate." The press, the president, and half the Cabinet diving under tables at the Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t just a security failure; it’s a bleak little preview of a country that’s busy turning every political event into a potential war zone while its leaders argue over who gets to grandstand on cable news about it.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
commander in beef: trump turns the white house into a ufc vip lounge
Trump and Dana White scouting future federal property improvements: fewer trees, more bloodsport branding opportunities.
The South Lawn is getting a tasteful update: grass, hedges, and a giant corporate fight cage. For Trump’s 80th birthday and the kickoff of his government-funded 250th ‘patriotic’ celebration, the White House is hosting a UFC extravaganza where the tickets are “free,” but the sponsorship packages with ringside seats mysteriously go for $1 million to $1.5 million a pop. The UFC swears it’s not selling tickets, TKO’s Mark Shapiro says they’ll lose up to $30 million on this, and nobody can explain where the money from those sponsorships is actually going. But don’t worry, the president is personally handpicking who gets into the taxpayer-owned backyard. Totally normal, very constitutional, not at all a soft-money brawl on federal property.
Demand is so insane that Republican officials, lobbyists, and anyone who’s ever brushed against MAGA world are reduced to begging Steven Cheung — a former UFC flack now playing White House gatekeeper with a replica championship belt in his office — to put them on the list. Dana White handed most of his allocation straight to Trump, TKO kept another chunk, and the rest are being distributed to “military, VIPs, friends, members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, and staff,” i.e., a curated audience of donors, sycophants, and useful photo-ops. Meanwhile, the UFC is building a 90-foot-tall fight arch in Pennsylvania, shipping it to D.C., and planning for 85,000 people to watch from the Ellipse while Paramount+ streams the whole state-sponsored spectacle.
Lara Trump says this may be “the event of his presidency,” which is accidentally honest: nothing captures the Trump era quite like monetizing access to the People’s House through an un-transparent sponsorship scheme while turning it into a live-action culture-war Thunderdome. It’s not policy, it’s not governance, it’s not even subtle — it’s just the presidency as pay-to-play cage match, with the grift baked directly into the undercard.
#forever-grifting#corruption#money
starve the poor, feed the donors
Pictured: the lazy welfare queen Republicans are bravely rescuing America from, seen here as a single mom and her 7-year-old trying to get back the groceries Trump’s "big, beautiful bill" just stole.
Trump’s "big, beautiful bill" is doing exactly what it was designed to do: shower tax cuts on the wealthy while yanking groceries out of kids’ hands, all wrapped in a flag and fireworks. The law extends breaks for corporations and the rich, then claws back $187 billion from SNAP over a decade. That’s not trimming fat; that’s taking dinner off the table. Nearly 3.5 million people have already fallen off food stamp rolls nationwide, because nothing says "economic genius" like increasing childhood hunger to goose donor portfolios.
Arizona, never one to pass up a chance to kick people while they’re down, went full pilot project for cruelty. The state rushed to implement expanded work requirements and buried applicants under new documentation and review hurdles, supposedly to "root out fraud." In reality, it’s rooting out children from the program: SNAP enrollment there has dropped by about 50% in a year, including roughly 200,000 kids. Families who should qualify are being cut off without warning, then forced to stand in hours-long lines at state offices and food banks just to maybe get enough to eat.
Republicans sold this as a tough-love nudge into the labor force; what they actually built is a hunger bureaucracy where single moms and people on oxygen tanks navigate paperwork mazes so hedge fund guys can keep their tax breaks. Food banks, already hit by earlier Trump-era funding cuts, are swamped with record demand while the White House brags about fiscal responsibility. It’s a neat trick: manufacture desperation, call it "accountability," and hope no one notices that the only people whose lives improved from this bill are the ones who never needed food stamps in the first place.
#healthcare#forever-grifting
trump discovers due process is optional when xi is your cop buddy
Trump and Xi, seen here deciding which rights are negotiable this week and which arrests make the best campaign B-roll.
U.S. and Chinese authorities have announced a joint drug bust just days before Donald Trump’s big state visit to Beijing, because nothing sets the mood for a summit like synchronized policing with a one-party surveillance state. Three Americans and two Chinese suspects were arrested in an operation spanning Florida, Nevada, and two Chinese provinces, with Beijing loudly congratulating itself on the "major achievement" while U.S. agencies have yet to formally confirm anything. Apparently the new standard for transparency is: trust the Chinese state broadcaster, the DEA will get back to you.
This comes on the heels of the U.S. quietly extraditing a Chinese drug suspect back to Beijing last month, a "rare" move that somehow became a lot less rare once Trump decided he wanted tariff concessions and a fentanyl photo op. China pledges crackdowns, Trump lowers his fentanyl-related tariffs, and suddenly we’re trading away leverage and human rights concerns for a press release about protonitazene and bromazolam. World peace and development, according to the Chinese foreign ministry; "look, I made Xi arrest some guys," according to the White House.
As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent does his pre-summit tour through Japan and South Korea, the message is clear: U.S. law enforcement is now a bargaining chip on Trump’s trade-and-drugs deal sheet. When you’re coordinating arrests with a government that disappears lawyers and jails journalists, the line between legitimate cooperation and outsourced repression gets very blurry, very fast. But hey, if the fentanyl tariffs go down and the campaign talking points go up, why worry about pesky things like due process, transparency, or who actually controls the handcuffs?
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump finally finds a fed chair who can’t say who won 2020
Kevin Warsh practices central bank independence by seeing how long he can dodge the question "Who won in 2020?" without losing his nomination.
The Senate is poised to hand Donald Trump the keys to the world’s most important central bank by confirming Kevin Warsh, a man who somehow managed to serve on the Fed for years yet cannot say whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Always comforting when the person in charge of interest rates treats basic reality like a trick question. Democrats are calling Warsh Trump’s “sock puppet,” which is unfair to socks, most of which have some structural integrity.
Warsh built his brand as an inflation hawk during the 2008 crisis, but now that Trump wants dirt-cheap money to juice his second-term miracle economy, Warsh has discovered that actually, rates are too high and the Fed’s leadership is “broken.” Fortunately for Trump, he’s already been running a live-fire loyalty test on Fed independence: launching a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell over building renovations that went over budget, then watching the Justice Department quietly drop it once a Republican senator threatened to stall Warsh’s nomination. Totally normal stuff in a healthy democracy.
Powell, who is apparently still under the impression that laws matter, is clinging to a board seat until the bogus investigation is "well and truly over" and keeps politely pointing out that the Fed is now having to sue the executive branch just to be allowed to do monetary policy without political orders from Mar-a-Lago. Meanwhile, Warsh promises he’ll be an “independent actor” while refusing to acknowledge who won the last election and auditioning for the role of Trump’s rate-cut concierge. The markets wanted stability; they’re getting a central bank chair who treats Fed independence like a negotiable line item in a loyalty oath.
#killing-democracy#fascism#forever-grifting
trump's big strong tariffs quietly turn into a $166bn refund line
A majestic government refund portal heroically trying to mop up $166bn of Trump’s trade-war cosplay with a digital teaspoon.
The great nationalist trade crusade has officially entered its chargeback phase. After the supreme court smacked down Trump’s IEEPA tariff joyride, the feds are now processing refunds on more than $166bn in fees that about 330,000 importers were forced to cough up so the former guy could LARP as a tariff genius. The fun twist: the bureaucracy everyone assumed would bury this for years is … actually working. Not fast, not elegantly, but in that uniquely American way where you upload something called a "Consolidated Administration and Processing for Entries Declaration" and pray to the Ace Secure Data Portal gods.
Businesses can get their money back, as long as they go through their original customs broker — because the government remembers how the pandemic-era Employee Retention Tax Credit turned into a buffet for fraud mills. So now small firms get to call the broker they fired for being useless and ask them, politely, to stop being useless for 60–90 days. On the bright side, some big shippers like FedEx, UPS, and DHL say they’ll actually pass refunds back to customers. Meanwhile Amazon, Apple, Costco, and the rest are sitting in the corner very quietly, presumably measuring whether sharing the cash would violate their core corporate ethos of keeping the money.
The cherry on this sundae of policy malpractice: a bunch of businesses already deducted those Trump tariffs on their 2025 taxes, so the 2026 refund will be taxable income. Trump’s trade war was such a success that companies now need accountants just to unwind the privilege of having funded it. The MAGA tariff era started as an emergency economic power and ended as an IRS line item and a government refund portal. Truly, the art of the deal.
#trade-war#forever-grifting#money
putin says his war is ‘coming to an end,’ maga hears ‘mission accomplished’
Putin calmly explaining his war is almost over, presumably because his favorite Western politicians are working hard to make sure Ukraine runs out of ammo first.
Vladimir Putin popped up on U.S. morning TV to announce that he believes the Ukraine war is "coming to an end," which is a bold statement from the guy who started it and keeps shoveling bodies into the furnace. Somewhere in Mar-a-Lago, the guy who tried to extort Ukraine for dirt and spent four years slobbering over Putin is almost certainly nodding along like this is a statesman delivering peace, not a war criminal trying to spin a stalemate.
American media dutifully airs the soundbite while the U.S. right keeps asking why we should help Ukraine at all, as if Trump didn’t already spend an entire presidency weakening NATO, echoing Kremlin talking points, and treating Zelensky like a customer service rep he could bully. Now Putin gets to float the idea that the war is wrapping up just as MAGA Republicans push to cut aid, giving him exactly what he wants: fewer weapons for Ukraine and more time for him to declare whatever shredded line on the map he holds as "victory."
So yes, the man who invaded a sovereign democracy says the war is nearly over, and the American authoritarian fan club—Trump, Vance, Rubio when the wind’s blowing that way—are all too happy to help him get there by kneecapping support for Kyiv. Ending a war is easy when your friends in U.S. politics keep turning off the lights for the people you invaded.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
trump’s overdose strategy: fund the ambulance, ban the seatbelts
Trump officials unveiling their overdose strategy: a shiny PowerPoint in one hand and a shredder full of harm-reduction programs in the other.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new approach to the overdose crisis: publicly brag about an "ambitious" National Drug Control Strategy while quietly yanking away every tool that actually prevents people from dying. First, CDC kneecapped "never use alone" messaging. Now Samhsa has decided federal money can’t be used for fentanyl test strips – the cheap, boring, annoyingly effective thing that lets people not die in the first place. As one expert put it, defunding test strips is basically a "win for the cartels", but sure, tell us more about being the law-and-order administration.
The White House is simultaneously proposing $10bn in cuts to addiction and overdose prevention, Medicaid changes that will help shutter rural hospitals and treatment centers, and a glossy drug strategy that only works if Congress ignores Trump’s own budget. The plan leans on decade-old tech like wastewater surveillance – which can’t even reliably detect some of the ultra-potent synthetics actually killing people – while shunning modern, patient-level tools like drug-checking and test strips. So yes, they’ll pay for naloxone to bring you back from an overdose, but they’re defunding the cheap strips that would let you avoid overdosing at all. It’s like banning smoke alarms and congratulating yourself for buying more body bags.
Former officials blame the chaos on "lack of coordination" between agencies, which is a very polite way of saying the right hand is writing press releases while the left hand is yanking out oxygen tubes. The result is a national drug policy that looks good on a podium, guts harm reduction on the ground, and treats preventable deaths as a rounding error in the culture war. The administration didn’t respond to requests for comment, presumably because it’s hard to explain how you managed to be both cruel and technologically outdated at the same time.
#healthcare#killing-democracy
men discover democracy is a group project
A rare sighting of men at a pro-democracy meeting, lured in with pizza, beer, and the faint hope that someone else will still do most of the work.
American democracy is collapsing under Trump 2.0, but don’t worry, women have it covered while a large chunk of men have apparently decided that authoritarianism is a ladies’ hobby. Saul Austerlitz describes his Brooklyn activist group, now about 80% women, frantically trying to hold the line while many men either slide right, burn out, or retreat into the safe space of craft beer and vinyl. After all, as long as Dobbs, ICE violence, and creeping autocracy mostly hit everyone else, a lot of white guys figure they’ll be "personally OK" – the political equivalent of hanging a cubicle sign that reads, "Your Emergency Is Not My Crisis."
Instead of waiting for a magical Male Conscience Awakening, Austerlitz and his (all female) co-leaders are resorting to the radical tactic of personally inviting men to care about their own democracy. They’re targeting fathers who allegedly don’t want to abandon their kids to Trump’s slow-motion constitutional bonfire, hosting pizza-and-beer resistance salons where the ask is painfully modest: text three annoyed dudes you know and convince them to show up next time. The big strategic vision for defeating authoritarianism in 2026 America? Not a robust rule-of-law response or institutional reform – just hoping enough guys can be coaxed off the couch and into a meeting before the "No Kings" rallies become a historical reenactment.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
