trump promises 1,000 hall monitors for democracy
DOJ election monitors bravely defend America from the menace of people quietly filling out ballots.
The Trump justice department, led on civil rights by Harmeet Dhillon because irony is now a performance art, is bragging it will send 1,000 election monitors to the 2026 midterms. On paper, that’s a normal DOJ function. In practice, it’s being announced by an administration whose leader still denies losing in 2020, tried to federalize elections by executive order, and has been suing states to get private voter data. So, just your standard "we swear this is about protecting democracy" from the guy still rage-posting that democracy cheated.
Voting rights experts are unimpressed, mostly because this DOJ can’t keep staff in the civil rights division, much less coordinate a 1,000-person cosplay operation. Past cycles had hundreds of monitors too, and so far these ones have mostly produced thrilling footage of government lawyers standing around with clipboards, being politely ignored by voters and moved outside the 100-foot line by local officials. States like Minnesota are now monitoring the monitors after a Trump-era immigration crackdown there killed people and deported thousands, which really builds trust when the feds show up to “help” with voting.
The department claims it wants the “largest monitoring effort in its history,” while state and local officials quietly restrict them to the sidewalk and refuse to let them inside polling places. Trump, meanwhile, keeps musing about the federal government taking over elections like they’re another failing casino he can run into the ground. So yes, the experts say this particular stunt probably won’t successfully sabotage the midterms. It’s just one more step in the ongoing experiment where the arsonist keeps insisting he’s only there to inspect the fire alarms.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s deportation machine builds ‘little la’ in exile
Nothing says ‘strong borders’ like deporting lifelong Angelenos until Mexico City has better LA vibes than Los Angeles.
The Trump administration’s dream of "making America great again" continues to mean making America smaller by ejecting anyone who doesn’t fit the Fox News casting call. Since Trump’s second inauguration in 2025, roughly 145,500 Mexican nationals have been deported, including people who’ve spent decades in the US and barely remember the country printed on their birth certificates. Mexico City’s Tabacalera neighborhood has quietly turned into "Little LA" – a patchwork of palm trees, Spanglish, and people who grew up in California but got one-way tickets to a place they last saw from a car seat.
Christopher Gil Ortíz is the new normal: snatched by ICE on his way to work in Los Angeles, handcuffed, detained, and dumped back in Mexico more than 30 years after he left as a child, his wife and two kids left behind in Trump’s America. He describes relief when he was finally detained – because living under constant threat by an administration obsessed with deportation raids is somehow worse than being exiled to a country you barely know. That’s the policy achievement here: turning the land of opportunity into a place where arrest feels like mercy.
In Mexico City, organizations like New Comienzos are doing the basic humanitarian work the US government can’t be bothered with: helping deportees get IDs, find jobs, and figure out how to exist in a place that’s technically their "home" but practically a foreign country. Meanwhile, Tabacalera’s anti-Trump graffiti does the constitutional oversight Congress refuses to. Trump gets to brag about "tough" immigration numbers on TV; the actual humans he expelled are busy building a shadow Los Angeles in exile, because the original decided it preferred fear to neighbors.
#anti-immigration#trumps-america
kushner finally buys something that actually wins in los angeles
Adam Silver, Josh Kushner, and Bob Iger plotting the next phase of late‑stage capitalism while pretending to watch tennis.
The Los Angeles Lakers are reportedly being flipped yet again, this time to former Disney emperor Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner, better known as Jared’s slightly less radioactive brother. Price tag: $12.5bn, or roughly the GDP of a small country, for the privilege of turning a once-beloved community franchise into a glorified hedge fund with courtside seats. Jerry Buss bought the team for $16m in 1979 and held it for decades; the new model is: buy, squeeze, flip, repeat.
This would be the second sale in 14 months, because nothing says "long-term vision" like treating an NBA dynasty the way Trump treats casinos and marriages. Private equity guys Mark Walter and Todd Boehly grabbed majority control at a $10bn valuation in 2025 and are now apparently cashing out with a tidy $2.5bn bump, having discovered that the real sport isn’t basketball, it’s asset inflation. The Buss family is busy reenacting Succession in purple and gold, squabbling over whether to unload their remaining 17.8% stake while everyone involved gives stirring speeches about "tradition" and "community" that would make a used-car salesman blush.
The NBA’s old model of "patient capital" is being replaced by the Kushner-Iger special: extractive finance wrapped in Hollywood branding. Teams are now traded like blocks of over-leveraged condos, and the league’s board of governors will almost certainly approve it, because why stop oligarchy at owning politics when it can own your childhood team too? The Trump extended universe may be a constitutional dumpster fire, but it’s doing gangbusters in the "quietly buying the culture" department. Showtime is dead; welcome to EBITDA Time.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting
navy considers swapping pearl harbor hero for draft-dodger-in-chief
Admiral Nimitz pins the Navy Cross on Doris “Dorie” Miller, back when the Navy honored actual courage instead of debating whether to name warships after guys who wage war mostly on social media.
The Navy is quietly debating whether to rename the future USS Doris Miller — the first aircraft carrier ever slated to honor a Black and enlisted sailor — after Donald Trump instead, because nothing says "respect for service" like sidelining an actual war hero for a guy whose most famous battle was against his own bone spurs.
Doris "Dorie" Miller, a mess attendant at Pearl Harbor, grabbed an anti-aircraft gun he wasn’t even trained on, shot down at least one Japanese plane, and dragged wounded sailors to safety. For that, he became the first Black service member to receive the Navy Cross. Under Trump’s first term, the Navy decided to finally name a carrier after him. Now, months of internal discussions are focused on whether to erase that milestone so the ship can instead double as a 100,000-ton floating MAGA billboard.
Officials say Miller is being considered for the Medal of Honor, which would conveniently nudge him into the "destroyer" tier of naming conventions, freeing up the big shiny carrier slot for a president whose closest brush with combat was yelling at staff on Truth Social. The final call will rest with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao — two men now positioned to decide whether the Navy honors a Black hero of democracy or leans fully into the Dear Leader Aircraft Carrier model of civil-military relations.
As a bonus, this fourth Ford-class carrier may be among the first to feature Trump’s preferred steam catapults instead of the newer electromagnetic launch system, because if you’re going to rename a ship after him, you might as well retrofit the technology to match his policy style: loud, inefficient, and decades behind the rest of the world.
#killing-democracy#racism
from ‘cheeto-dusted cartoon villain’ to ‘yes boss’ in one pardon request
Michael Cohen, pausing between calling Trump a conman and calling him ‘boss,’ while mentally drafting his pardon application.
Michael Cohen, the man who once called himself Trump’s “attack dog with a law license,” has now returned to the kennel. After years of describing Trump as a racist, predator, conman, wannabe dictator and existential threat to democracy, Cohen is back on the radio calling him “boss” and being praised for having “recanted everything you said.” Nothing says totally innocent president like your convicted fixer doing a public loyalty ritual on 77WABC.
This is the same Cohen who pled guilty to campaign finance crimes, tax evasion, bank fraud and lying to Congress – explicitly saying he did it to cover up Trump’s “dirty deeds,” warning there might never be a peaceful transfer of power, and begging the country not to let what happened to him happen to the whole republic. He then wrote books about how Trump weaponized the Department of Justice against critics and spent years on a podcast calling Trump a “boorish cartoon misogynist” and “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain” while openly hoping he’d rot in prison.
Now Trump is back in the Oval Office, Cohen’s Biden clemency bid has flopped, and suddenly he “felt pressured and coerced” by prosecutors and would very much like a pardon please. The man who once testified that Trump wanted to be “autocrat, supreme leader, dictator” is now demonstrating, live, how that works: you either praise the dear leader, or you get crushed. It’s less a reconciliation and more a cautionary tale about what happens when you build a presidency on crime, revenge, and broken people who will say anything to survive.
#corruption#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump cancels war games, auditions for role of kim’s bestie
Trump and Kim at the DMZ in 2019, back when the price of flattering a dictator hadn’t yet been invoiced to South Korea’s security budget.
Trump has decided that 18,000 South Korean troops and a dozen US allies don't need the second half of their annual military exercise, because it’s "inappropriate and hostile" to the guy firing ballistic missiles and threatening nuclear strikes. Ulchi Freedom Shield gets cut in half by presidential tantrum, and Seoul gets the news the same way the rest of us do: from Trump’s mouth, after the fact. The South Korean foreign minister then has to stand there and pretend this was a "mutual" decision, which is a very polite way of saying "we found out when he tweeted it."
Allies look at joint drills as the backbone of the US-South Korea security alliance; Trump looks at them as a bad invoice and an obstacle to his next photo-op with Kim Jong Un. Experts now openly worry he might yank some of the 27,000 US troops out of South Korea or casually abandon denuclearisation of the North — you know, minor shifts in decades of policy — again, without telling the country that actually gets shelled first.
The administration has stopped even pretending to separate trade and security. Trump is mad that Seoul won’t sign up for his Iran adventure, mad that they only pay about $1bn a year for US troops, mad they haven’t thrown $350bn in investments fast enough, and mad US companies don’t get enough special treatment. So he’s turning alliance commitments into a protection racket: pay up, join our wars, or watch your deterrent walk away. Regional democracies like Japan and Taiwan are quietly panicking, while South Korean analysts are now floating the once-taboo idea of building their own nuclear weapons because Washington under Trump is about as reliable as a crypto exchange audit.
Meanwhile, North Korea keeps lobbing missiles toward Japan and reminding everyone it has nukes and "the right" to use them, while Trump’s priority is making sure Kim doesn’t feel "disrespected" by military drills. The US used to reassure allies that it wouldn’t trade their security for a handshake with a dictator. Under Trump, that’s starting to sound less like a promise and more like an expired coupon.
#imperialism#national-security
trump uses war to frack the constitution
Artist’s impression of federal “oversight” of offshore drilling: a blindfolded oil executive holding a rubber stamp over an oil-soaked pelican.
The pipeline that puked oil all over Santa Barbara in 2015 is back in business, and now a federal judge has helpfully declared that, yes, Donald Trump can use the Defense Production Act like his own personal Monopoly card to ignore California and keep the crude flowing. Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Trump’s DPA order preempts state law, including California’s pesky claim that this whole thing is an “egregious trespass on public land”. When federal power and oil profits collide with state environmental protections, guess which one gets run over.
Sable Offshore, which bought the rust bucket from ExxonMobil in 2024, restarted operations under Trump’s emergency order, allegedly to address “supply disruption risks” caused by California policies, not, say, Trump’s war in Iran that lit the oil market on fire. The judge did toss Sable a $1.5m fine for violating a consent decree, which is basically a parking ticket stapled to a license to spill. Oversight is now shifted to federal authorities, i.e., the same crew that ordered the pipeline reopened in the first place. Regulatory capture, but make it offshore.
Energy secretary Chris Wright solemnly announced that this is all about “national security and defense” and “putting all Americans and their energy security first”, which is a flowery way of saying “California, shut up and take the sludge.” Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, pointed out the obvious: Trump sparked a war in the Middle East, gas prices spiked, and now he’s using the crisis he manufactured to ram through his long-time fantasy of turning California’s coastline into a Chevron theme park. The California attorney general’s office had no immediate comment, possibly because they were busy Googling “how to sue a president who thinks the Defense Production Act is a magic wand.”
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump and rfk jr declare war on measles vaccines, children volunteer as collateral
Andrew Wakefield, former doctor, current patron saint of people who get their medical advice from Facebook comment sections.
Donald Trump has signed an executive order telling states to offer separate measles, mumps, and rubella shots instead of the standard combined MMR vaccine, while simultaneously declaring the triple jab "quite lethal"—a bold claim, given that the lethality in question mostly describes his administration’s IQ. There’s just one tiny snag: those separate vaccines don’t exist in the US, don’t have licenses, and drug companies have already said there’s no science to justify them. So what he’s really offering parents is a choice between a safe, effective vaccine and panic fueled by a Fox News fever dream.
The White House brain trust powering this stunt? A disgraced British ex-doctor, Andrew Wakefield—who helped trigger the original MMR panic in 1998 and now enjoys folk-hero status in Texas anti-vax circles—and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the man who turned vaccine paranoia into a full-time lifestyle brand. Together with Trump, they’re pushing to shrink the US childhood vaccine schedule, pointing to Denmark as their model while conveniently skipping the part where Denmark has universal healthcare and functioning public health systems, unlike the for-profit chaos they’re busily sabotaging.
Public health experts worldwide say no country recommends single measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines, but Trump’s executive order is designed to muddy the water just enough that confused parents conclude the combined jab must be dangerous—and maybe no jab is better. That’s how you get falling vaccination rates, rising measles cases, and kids paying the price for a president who thinks epidemiology is something you cure with a Truth Social post. Trump keeps waxing poetic about "beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children" while building policy on YouTube comments and RFK Jr podcasts. The only thing being immunized here is the administration’s ego—against facts.
#anti-science#killing-democracy
trump invents the migrant shell game
ICE’s latest innovation: deportation roulette, now with a bonus mystery country round.
The US just shipped 20 people to Liberia, the first installment of a 1,200-person human offshoring package Donald Trump’s administration cut with Monrovia. Most of them aren’t even Liberian. They’re African, North American, South American, and Caribbean nationals being dumped in a country they often have never seen, because the White House needed a fresh workaround for that pesky asylum system.
Liberia’s justice minister says most of the deportees are guilty of “migration-related violations” and can seek asylum in Liberia if they like, which is a bit like being pushed off a lifeboat and told you’re free to swim to whichever shark looks friendliest. Immigration lawyers point out that this is the whole point: use third-country deportations as a legal escape hatch to quietly force asylum seekers back toward the countries they were fleeing, while pretending the US isn’t technically doing refoulement.
This Liberia deal is one of a series of often-secret agreements where the Trump administration has scattered thousands of people across nearly two dozen countries, about 10 in Africa alone, turning the global south into a dumping ground for America’s broken conscience. It’s not border policy, it’s a geopolitical version of “lost and found” where the US keeps losing people and hoping someone else will deal with the fallout.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
pentagon to independent military paper: retire? no, you're fired for thinking
The Pentagon’s vision of a free press: you’re free to print whatever we already wrote for you.
The Pentagon is reportedly considering firing Max Lederer, the long-serving publisher of Stars and Stripes, weeks before his planned retirement, right after the paper reported on miserable conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during Trump’s shiny new US‑Israel war on Iran. Lederer already said he was leaving because his idea of journalism doesn’t really line up with the Trump administration’s idea of "please clap for the Dear Leader’s aircraft carrier." Apparently that wasn’t submissive enough, so now they’re debating whether to shove him out the door just to make the point.
This isn’t some random blog; Stars and Stripes has been around since the civil war and exists to give service members independent news, not Pentagon fan fiction. Editor Erik Slavin has been openly saying his "foxhole" is editorial independence, which, under the second Trump administration, is roughly as welcome as a subpoena at Mar-a-Lago. The paper’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, was already fired in January after criticizing new restrictions and is now suing the Pentagon for retaliation, because of course she is.
Meanwhile, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell is proudly announcing the "modernization" of Stars and Stripes, which turns out to mean: dump Reuters and AP, ban anything that looks like journalism, and convert the outlet into a glossy catalog of "warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY"—so, CrossFit meets North Korean state TV. This follows the Trump Pentagon’s broader hobby of ejecting mainstream outlets from their workspaces, packing the press room with friendly propagandists, "unofficially" rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War, and trying to supervise reporters like unruly toddlers.
So yes, the military’s historic independent newspaper is being slowly throttled, its watchdogs fired, and its leadership threatened with premature termination for the crime of telling troops what’s actually happening on a carrier. Freedom of the press is doing great; it’s just being carefully adapted to serve a new generation of autocrats.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump administration declares open season on world heritage sites
Horseshoe Bend, future site of the Department of Interior’s ‘Have You Tried Fracking It?’ pilot program.
The Trump administration has decided that the best use of a UNESCO world heritage site and sacred Indigenous landscape is as a backdrop for pumpjacks and uranium rigs. The Bureau of Land Management, now apparently rebranded as the Bureau of Liquidate Monuments, is proposing to erase a 10-mile drilling-free buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico so fossil fuel companies can cozy right up to thousand-year-old pueblos. UNESCO, whose whole job is "please don’t wreck humanity’s irreplaceable stuff", has politely pointed out that extractive projects are not compatible with world heritage status, but the White House seems far more interested in what Exxon thinks.
Public input, of course, was handled in the classic Trump-era style: an unusually short 14-day comment period for a plan that would open 336,000 acres next to Chaco to oil, gas, and uranium extraction — and still they got about 100,000 mostly hostile submissions. Tribal leaders, archaeologists, conservationists, and basically anyone who can read a history book say the move will cause "irreversible damage", which in Trump-world is less a warning than a mission statement. Former Interior secretary Deb Haaland, who created the buffer in 2023, called out Trump and BLM director Steve Pearce for trying to cash in on a sacred site; they responded by continuing to try to cash in on a sacred site.
This isn’t a one-off accident, it’s a franchise. The same administration has already leased land for drilling near Carlsbad Caverns, Republicans are pushing to lift the uranium mining ban near the Grand Canyon, and the Everglades is on UNESCO’s "in danger" list while the White House shouts "drill, baby, drill" over the sound of climate-fueled wildfires and record heat. Trump helpfully summarized the doctrine: America will be "rich again" because of the "liquid gold under our feet" — a handy way of saying that if there’s a choice between world heritage, Indigenous rights, and a livable climate, or one more quarter of fossil fuel profits, this government will gladly throw the planet and a few millennia of culture into the well.
#killing-democracy#anti-science
trump plays fry cook, actual fry cook tries to fix the damage
Donald Trump playing fry cook for the cameras, moments before returning to his real job: deep-frying Medicaid and serving tax cuts to billionaires.
Trump once cosplayed as a McDonald’s worker in Pennsylvania for a campaign photo op, where he pretended to learn the fryer and drive-thru while serving up unsubstantiated claims about Kamala Harris’s summer job. He promised he’d "end inflation" and bring prices down; instead, we got the usual: soaring costs, shredded safety nets, and a "big, beautiful" bill that helps billionaires while kicking families off Medicaid. Performance art: A+. Governance: drive-thru window slammed in your face.
Manny Rutinel, an actual former fry cook who sold his own blood plasma to get through school, is now running for Congress in Colorado’s 8th to clean up the mess. He helped pass state tax credits that cut child poverty by nearly 40%, while Trump and incumbent Republican Gabe Evans are busy undermining the very programs that kept his family afloat when he was a kid. Rutinel holds in-person town halls and refuses corporate PAC money; Evans takes hundreds of thousands from corporate PACs, calls basic election legitimacy "not a yes-no question", and vanishes whenever workers strike or constituents want answers.
On affordability, the contrast is brutally simple: one guy who used to work the McDonald’s fryer is trying to keep a family of four from paying $2,000 a month for the same health plan that cost $500 two years ago, while the other guy is quietly cashing checks from the same interests driving up prices. Trump’s "working-class" brand turns out to be a costume he wore for ten minutes at a closed restaurant. The former fry cook? He’s the one actually trying to stop Trump’s "big, beautiful" health care cuts from closing hospitals in his own district.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
pentagon’s favorite client state admits it shot a 5‑year‑old, promises very serious shrug
Arturo Béjar arrives in court to explain that Meta knew kids were being harmed and chose vibes and ad revenue anyway — sort of like US foreign policy, but with more push notifications.
Israel has finally admitted that its soldiers opened fire on the car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six of her family members in Gaza back in January 2024 — the same incident they spent months insisting they had nothing to do with. Hind died after a three-hour phone call begging the Palestinian Red Crescent to rescue her, while the Israel Defense Forces claimed they simply weren’t in the area. Turns out, according to media investigations, those mysterious nearby tanks weren’t ghosts after all.
The IDF now says there will be a criminal investigation, which in Israeli military justice terms usually translates to: hold a press conference, issue a sternly worded PDF, and then quietly misplace the file. A UN report already described a “pervasive climate of impunity” in the occupied territories, and a UN commission has found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — tens of thousands of civilians dead, whole neighborhoods erased, and Washington still signing the weapons checks like it’s Amazon Prime for artillery.
Meanwhile, back in the land of freedom and democracy cosplay, the Trump-era GOP and its successors spent years turning unconditional support for this into a patriotic sacrament: endless weapons, zero red lines, and anyone asking about dead kids was accused of hating America, Israel, and probably Christmas. The result: a five-year-old spends her last hours on the phone, begging to be saved from US-armed allies who later say, whoops, our bad, we’ll investigate ourselves and get back to you never.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
larry david tells trump’s impeachment lawyer to curb his damn ethics
Alan Dershowitz on Martha’s Vineyard, wondering how defending Trump, Epstein, and Weinstein *possibly* led to social consequences in a community that watches HBO.
Alan Dershowitz, once a semi-respected Harvard law professor and now the Paul Manafort of cable news green rooms, is still mad that Larry David won’t talk to him after he joined Trump’s impeachment defense team. Larry, whose job is literally to play an unlikable crank on TV, saw Dersh in a Vineyard grocery store and upgraded him from ‘old friend’ to ‘disgusting’ faster than you can say ‘unitary executive.’ When your social circle is basically Seinfeld and you still manage to be the moral low ground, that’s a skill.
Dershowitz, who has helpfully curated a client list that runs from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein to Harvey Weinstein, is wounded that the Hollywood comedy guy didn’t reach out when his son died, then runs to The Atlantic to workshop his feelings between complaints that Democrats are now the “most anti-Israel party in US history.” David briefly flirts with forgiveness, then calls the reporter back like a man haunted by his own conscience and clarifies: Dersh “made a deal with the devil. Literally. And I’d bet the devil hasn’t said a word to him since the impeachment.” Even Satan, it seems, has higher standards for legal counsel than Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just quietly drop-kicked Dershowitz’s $300m defamation tantrum against CNN, where he claimed they edited his impeachment comments to make it look like he had “lost his mind.” The justices, who love executive power these days, apparently drew the line at pretending Dersh still had a reputation left to defame. So we end up with the perfect Trump-era epilogue: a once-famous civil libertarian turned Fox News foghorn, ostracized on Martha’s Vineyard, whining that cancel culture took his friends away—when really, it was just that one tiny choice to help a would-be autocrat stay in office after trying to overthrow democracy.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
operation economic fury: trump declares sanctions on planet earth
Trump announces ‘economic D-Day’ on Iran and, accidentally, the rest of the global economy, live from the Oval Office’s new War Room: the Truth Social app.
Donald Trump has now moved from sanctioning Iran to basically sanction-curious about the entire planet. On Truth Social, he announced "TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences" for any country that dares do business with Tehran, promising "the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country!" — which is a bold claim from a guy who can’t explain how tariffs work. No details, no named targets, just all-caps threats and the diplomatic subtlety of a cinder block.
The expired 60-day ceasefire with Iran? No talks, no off-ramp, just Trump rolling straight from shooting war to financial carpet bombing under the branding genius of "Operation Economic Fury." Now he’s upgraded to "economic D-Day," because why not casually reference World War II while threatening to cut off airports, banks, and governments worldwide from the dollar system like he’s banning them from Mar-a-Lago.
He warned that "ANY country" offering any kind of "lifeline" to Iran — oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, ship registries, you name it — will face those mystical TREMENDOUS consequences. What consequences? Unclear. How will this affect allies, global markets, and the already spiraling conflict he and Israel kicked off in February? Also unclear. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently promised to isolate Iran "like the world has never seen before," and Trump seems to have heard that as: what if we just hold the whole global economy hostage and see who blinks first.
The BBC politely notes they’ve asked the White House and Treasury for comment, which is adorable, because the actual policy seems to be: Trump posts some caps-lock fan fiction about economic warfare, and the rest of the government scrambles to pretend there’s a coherent strategy behind it. Killing democracy is so passé; we’ve moved on to destabilizing the entire international financial system by social media post.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
trump admin declares holy war on… efficient tires
Trump’s America: the federal government sues to protect your constitutional right to burn extra gas on lousy tires.
California quietly did a boring, practical thing: it decided that when people replace their tires, those tires should not be energy-wasting garbage from the Bush era. The California Energy Commission unanimously approved rules that say replacement tires have to be at least as efficient as the ones that come on new cars, which will cut emissions, save drivers close to $1 billion a year, and basically function as a “please don’t light the planet on fire quite so fast” policy.
Naturally, the right immediately melted down. Conservative outlets screamed "massive regulatory overreach" because tires that save you $179 in gas over their life might cost an extra $1.50–$6.50 up front. Industry groups howled, except Michelin, which awkwardly broke ranks by admitting the standards are technically feasible and align with what they’re already doing. Meanwhile, gas prices are sky-high thanks to the US-Israel war with Iran, making the savings even bigger—so of course the outrage machine is focused on defending the sacred right to buy cheap, inefficient rubber.
Hovering over all this is the Trump administration, which has been suing California cities to protect fossil fuels, trying to kill the state’s gas-car phaseout, and attacking its clean car rules in court. Federal climate policy under Trump is basically: if California finds a way to reduce emissions without needing federal permission, crush it; if it does need federal permission, deny it. So while California is out here regulating rolling resistance, the White House is busy regulating resistance to its fossil-fuel donors. One side is trying to keep cars from wasting energy, the other is trying to keep the government wasting time in court.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
pillow king orders hand-counted participation trophy
Mike Lindell, seen here preparing to hand-count every ballot until one of them finally tells him he’s special.
Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate and full-time election truther, has decided that losing Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary by 11 points is merely a suggestion. He’s now offering to personally bankroll a full hand recount and audit of every paper ballot in the state, because when you’ve torched tens of millions chasing imaginary fraud, what’s another $825,000 between you and reality?
Clutching a Minnesota statute like it’s the last MyPillow promo code on Earth, Lindell insists he has the "right" to a complete hand count and plans to use it "to the full extent of the law"—which, translated, means forcing election workers to spend weeks proving he lost by exactly the same humiliating margin, but slower. His campaign is alleging mysterious "irregularities" in electronic reporting data, also known as: the numbers where he did badly.
This latest tantrum comes on the heels of Lindell refusing to concede and just weeks after he quietly settled a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit from a voting tech company formerly known as Dominion, which he spent years accusing of masterminding a global election heist. Courts have repeatedly told him his claims are nonsense, but the Big Lie industrial complex has no off switch—just a bigger, more desperate crowdfunding page.
So Minnesota gets to be the next stage for the ongoing Republican experiment: what if we treat every inconvenient election result as provisional until the most conspiracy-addled guy in the room feels emotionally validated? The good news is he has to pay for this circus himself. The bad news is the price democracy keeps paying so these people can cosplay as victims is a lot higher than $825,000.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid
census bureau now offering bespoke voter fraud fanfic
President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demonstrate how to turn the Census Bureau from a statistical agency into an election denialist Etsy shop.
The Trump administration has discovered an exciting new use for the Census Bureau: turning a nonpartisan statistical agency into a content mill for election conspiracy fan fiction. An unsigned, seven-page "report" — helpfully assembled not by career Census experts but by a team that includes friends from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute — magically finds over 24,000 alleged noncitizen voters in 2020, with Trump promising the number will "explode" once they finish running the rest of the data through the grievance blender.
Normally, the Census Bureau measures things like population and housing. Under Trump, it now measures how far you can stretch a commercial voter file and some mystery admin records before every election expert in the country starts laughing. The methodology is opaque, the authors are anonymous, and the people who supposedly believe in it refuse to answer questions — which, in this White House, now counts as "maximizing transparency." Meanwhile, actual studies show noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare, but that hasn't stopped Trump from using these junk numbers to demand sweeping new voting restrictions just in time for the midterms.
Election experts are openly calling the analysis "laughable," which is generous, because the punchline is that even these cooked numbers are too tiny to have changed the 2020 outcome. So the administration has managed to corrupt the Census, launder partisan propaganda through a federal agency, and still not find enough imaginary fraud to justify the coup they keep retroactively trying to validate. Strong work all around.
#killing-democracy#fascism#forever-grifting
trump’s tax cuts finally send the bill, it’s $40 trillion
The U.S. Capitol, bravely standing guard over $40 trillion of "fiscally conservative" decisions and one very large donor-class receipt.
The US gross national debt has waddled past $40,000,000,000,000 for the first time, which is a lot of zeroes for a country that was told Trump’s tax cuts would "pay for themselves" like some kind of magic beanstalk. The Treasury’s books now show $40.047 trillion in total public debt outstanding, a number large enough to fund basic healthcare in a sane country or, in our case, a few more gold-plated fighter jets and a permanent tax holiday for people who own yachts that have their own yachts.
Decades of bipartisan fiscal cowardice are in the mix, but Trump’s deficit-bomb tax cuts are right there in the write‑up: a giant, gift‑wrapped transfer to corporations and the ultra‑rich that blew an already leaky budget straight through the hull. Social safety-net programs get framed as the scary cost driver, while nobody mentions that we chose to give away trillions in revenue so Jared’s friends could buy a third vacation home and then lecture everyone about "fiscal responsibility". Expect Republicans to use this milestone as an excuse to demand cuts to food assistance and Social Security, while carefully leaving untouched the one thing that actually helped create this mess: their donors’ tax bills.
So yes, the US has a $40 trillion tab. The good news is we know exactly who ordered the most expensive items on the menu. The bad news is they’ve already left the restaurant, holding a lifetime supply of stock buybacks and carried interest, while the rest of us get to argue over which public service to starve so the check doesn’t bounce.
#forever-grifting#money
meet the human printer running the white house feed
Natalie Harp, faithfully lugging the portable printer that turns Trump’s whims into official reality, one freshly inked delusion at a time.
Natalie Harp, former OAN host and professional Trump resurrection story, has gone from RNC cancer testimonial to executive assistant to the president — a job that normally means scheduling meetings, not curating reality for an aspiring autocrat. Officially, she’s the person who handles logistics and paperwork. Unofficially, she’s the “human printer,” constantly glued to Trump’s side with a portable printer like some cursed Office Depot angel, deciding which headlines and social posts get beamed directly into the presidential brainstem.
This isn’t just quirky office culture. Whoever controls the paper flow to a president who barely reads and only trusts praise has massive power over what he believes is happening in the world. Harp also ghostwrites his Truth Social posts, typing in his voice while he watches Kamala Harris speeches and rants, which means some of those unhinged presidential statements aren’t just from Trump’s id — they’re co-produced fan fiction. Reporters and insiders describe her as his “gatekeeper,” “comfort blanket,” and, per Maggie Haberman, basically his emotional support staffer on secret national-security flights, because apparently the nuclear codes travel with a binky now.
When Senator Jon Ossoff’s questions put a spotlight on her influence, the White House responded not with transparency, but with a toddler-grade meltdown on X, calling CNN’s Kristen Holmes a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment” and predicting her own children will be “sickened” by her journalism. So the public learns that a devoted election denier — who reportedly once wrote to Trump, “You are all that matters to me” — is filtering his information, scripting his posts, and flying on sensitive trips, and the official response is to threaten reporters’ future family therapy bills. Totally normal, healthy democracy stuff.
#killing-democracy#fascism
