The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Justice Department’s latest cosplay as a mob collections agency just hit a wall. A federal judge blocked Trump’s DOJ from subpoenaing Fed chair Jerome Powell over some allegedly scandalous building renovations, noting there was a “mountain of evidence” that the whole thing was just a pressure campaign to make Powell slash interest rates or resign. The court helpfully observed that DOJ had produced “essentially zero evidence” of any crime, which is a pretty bold way of saying: this isn’t law enforcement, it’s a shakedown.

Trump has spent the past year publicly calling the guy he appointed in 2018 “stupid” and “too slow” for not tanking rates on command, and now—what a coincidence!—his administration is trying to criminalize cost overruns on a construction project. Meanwhile, GOP senator Thom Tillis briefly remembered what a spine is, warning that appealing the ruling will just delay confirming Trump’s preferred replacement, Kevin Warsh, who just happens to be more eager to do the president’s bidding on cheap money.

As a bonus authoritarian side quest, the Supreme Court is weighing Trump’s attempt to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook over mortgage-fraud allegations that look suspiciously selective, given that even his own Treasury secretary Scott Bessent allegedly played similar games on his paperwork. So the Trump White House is now trying to purge and intimidate central bankers with criminal probes and loyalty tests, then insisting this is all about good governance and not, say, turning the Federal Reserve into Mar-a-Lago’s in-house ATM.

Donald Trump has finally achieved his life’s dream: not just being president, but being king of an empire with his very own open-ended war in Iran. After spending his second term LARPing as a monarch – posting AI videos of himself in a crown dumping sludge on protesters, slapping his name on the Kennedy Center and the US Institute of Peace, demolishing the East Wing to build a ballroom, and getting his face on a semiq-dollar coin – he’s now upgraded from petty authoritarian cosplay to the real thing: a unilateral war built on zero accountability and a Supreme Court permission slip.

The road to this mess was paved with shredded safeguards. Trump gutted post-Watergate anti-corruption rules, fired 17 inspectors general, and bypassed the Senate to install loyalist prosecutors. Then he handed the keys of law enforcement to Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, turning DOJ and the FBI into his personal revenge squad. They dutifully tried to prosecute Letitia James and James Comey in what his own chief of staff Susie Wiles cheerfully admitted was just “score settling” – a phrase that used to be a red flag and is now apparently official White House policy branding.

Unlike Nixon, who at least had the decency to be stopped by a functioning Congress and a Supreme Court that still believed presidents weren’t literal sun gods, Trump enjoys a 6-3 court that blessed him with sweeping immunity for “official acts.” Sonia Sotomayor warned this could let a president order assassinations or deploy the military against political enemies; Trump heard that as a to-do list. He’s already sent troops into US cities, ordered illegal strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean, and used federal agencies as tools of retribution. The Iran war is just the logical next step of an imperial presidency that stopped pretending to be constrained by law.

So here we are: Congress sidelined on war and spending, watchdogs fired, prosecutors handpicked, the courts rubber-stamping “King Trump,” and the executive branch rebranded as one man’s stage show with live ammunition. The old fear was that the presidency might become too powerful. Trump and his enablers solved that debate by skipping straight to the sequel: what if we just don’t have a democracy anymore?

Donald Trump has apparently decided that the best way to keep his would-be successors in line is to turn them into background characters from a cursed circus. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice-President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are all reportedly trudging around in Trump-gifted Florsheim shoes that don’t fit, because the president demands to know – or guess – their shoe size as a proxy for, yes, penis size. The supposed leaders of American foreign policy are literally clomping through geopolitics in clown shoes to avoid offending a man with famously tiny hands.

Rubio, angling for the Oval Office, is now the nation’s top diplomat while visibly dressed like a child playing dress-up in Daddy’s wardrobe, trying to “grow into” the big shoes of John Quincy Adams and James Baker by way of discount Oxfords. Hegseth, meanwhile, is so fragile about his image that he banned independent press photographers from the Pentagon briefing room after some unflattering shots, ensuring only state-approved images of his Very Serious Man cosplay will emerge – ideally none that include the humiliating footwear. This is happening as reporting confirms the US was responsible for a Tomahawk strike on an Iranian elementary school on day one of the war, and the Pentagon’s chief tough guy still can’t summon the decency to publicly own the atrocity.

Vance may be the saddest of the shoe models: a vice-president who sold himself as anti–“stupid wars” now spectating from the sidelines of a very stupid war, iced out of both strategy and the meme wars by the White House accounts. Having built a career as the big guy’s guy, he’s now discovering that when the big guy hands you size-13 loyalty loafers, they can start to look a lot like dead men’s shoes. The Trump administration’s governing philosophy remains consistent: maximum vanity, mandatory humiliation, zero accountability – and absolutely no one in the room wearing shoes that actually fit the job.

Harvard pulmonary specialists have crunched the numbers and come to a shocking conclusion: if you defund healthcare, deregulate pollution, stall clean energy, undercut workplace protections, and let Robert F Kennedy Jr run around poisoning the vaccine well, people’s lungs do not, in fact, thrive. The study describes Trump’s second-term agenda across 10 policy areas as an "attack on Americans’ lungs" that will cause millions to "die needlessly" – which, if you’ve been following the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, appears to be the feature, not a bug.

The OBBBA rips more than $1tn out of health programs, threatening Medicaid coverage, vaccines, emergency care, and basic meds. The White House, via spokesperson Kush Desai, insists this is just "commonsense" reform to fight waste, fraud, and abuse – a bold rebranding of "we took away your inhaler so Exxon could have a slightly nicer quarter." Meanwhile, the administration is busy shredding air pollution rules on soot, mercury, and tailpipe emissions, forcing fossil fuel plants to keep belching poison, and trying to kneecap California’s EV mandates. Corporations get cleaner balance sheets; everyone else gets a lifetime subscription to pulmonary clinics they can no longer afford.

It doesn’t stop there. Workplace protections for coal miners are delayed, CDC and FDA budgets are slashed, and under Health Secretary RFK Jr, vaccine uptake is tanking as federal officials mainline conspiracy theories straight into the public bloodstream. The study sketches a composite patient with COPD who loses coverage, breathes more soot, gets less help to quit smoking, and skips Covid and flu shots because the government told them science is optional now. Toss in climate-fueled wildfires supercharged by environmental rollbacks, and you’ve basically built a national respiratory death trap with a gold-plated Trump logo on the entrance.

Experts warn that children, poor and working-class communities, Black communities with already sky-high asthma rates, and coal miners in red states will be hit the hardest, because of course they will. Federal agencies, once vaguely dedicated to public health, have been repurposed as a sacrifice zone for industry profits and culture-war cosplay. As one lung specialist notes, the scale of harmful policy is "unprecedented" and requires more than just rolling it back – but for now, the Trump administration’s healthcare vision is clear: if you can’t afford to breathe, maybe the free market decided you didn’t deserve lungs.

Trump’s attempt to turn U.S. international broadcasting into MAGA TV hit a minor snag when a federal judge ruled that Kari Lake’s stint as acting CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media was, legally speaking, trash. Judge Royce Lamberth voided everything she did from July 31 to Nov. 19 — including a mass firing of 500+ Voice of America and USAGM staff — because it violated federal law. Lake responded with the dignity befitting a top public official: by mocking the judge’s appearance and announcing she’ll just hang around as deputy CEO anyway, while Trump parachutes in another loyalist to keep the wrecking ball swinging.

The new nominee, Sarah Rogers, is currently undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and, conveniently, a former First Amendment lawyer for the NRA who now spends her days waging holy war against European efforts to regulate hate speech and disinformation. Rogers will, if confirmed, simultaneously run State’s propaganda shop and USAGM, just as the Trump administration openly talks about folding Voice of America’s "function" into her State Department bureau so it stops being "semi-independent" and starts being fully obedient. Nothing says "free press" like putting a government PR official in charge of the newsroom.

Rogers brings quite the résumé: she’s defended Charlie Kirk from “social media censorship,” cheered U.S. sanctions on European officials over online speech rules, and gone on X to diagnose Europe with a "civilizational death drive" for things like not loving nuclear plants enough and accepting "hostile low-human-capital migrants." She then upgraded the mask-off rhetoric by declaring that Germany "retains very few Jews, yet imported barbarian rapist hordes" — a phrase she defended as debate-provoking and, naturally, an example of free expression being oppressed by European law. This is the person Trump wants running America’s flagship international broadcaster, which is supposed to model independent journalism, not 4chan.

While Voice of America Director Michael Abramowitz gamely congratulated Rogers and talked about rebuilding VOA’s "vital mission," the actual mission from the White House is pretty clear: punish an agency whose job is to report news, stuff it inside State’s messaging operation, and put it under the control of someone who thinks Europe is dying because it doesn’t platform enough racist invective. The court said Kari Lake’s power grab was illegal; Trump’s answer is to make the power grab official and wrap it in Senate confirmation. The authoritarian learning curve is steep, but they’re studying.