57 minutes of presidential word salad
President Trump explains complex global issues using the same tone he reserves for rating golf courses and cable news hosts.
NBC hands Donald Trump nearly an hour of primetime oxygen so he can ramble through Minneapolis, Joe Rogan, the Fed, AI, Iran, and 2028 like a man trying to speedrun the demise of institutional credibility. Tom Llamas gamely plays tour guide while the president treats monetary policy as a vibe, foreign policy as a threat reel, and the future of democracy as a personal brand extension.
The network packages it as a "wide-ranging" interview, which is a polite way of saying "no coherent governing theory detected." Between teasing lower interest rates like a Black Friday sale, dangling 2028 as if term limits are just a suggestion, and talking tough on Iran for the camera, the whole thing functions as a campaign rally disguised as journalism. The White House gets a free infomercial; the public gets more gaslighting about how all of this is totally normal.
Hovering around the video player are Trump-world greatest hits: a racist video of the Obamas on his Truth Social page, a discount prescription drug website that sounds like it was brainstormed between indictments, and yet another round of "be very worried" threats to a foreign leader. America’s civic life is now a content carousel where the president toggles between race-baiting, grifting, and saber-rattling, and the press dutifully slaps on a chyron and calls it an exclusive.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
project vault: trump discovers humanitarian bombing, but for minerals
Trump announcing that the Congo begged him to take its minerals, surrounded by men who definitely think 'due diligence' is a gender studies course.
Donald Trump has decided the best way to honor the hundreds of miners recently crushed to death in a collapsed coltan pit in eastern DRC is to…announce that African leaders are begging him to "come and take our minerals" and then launch a $12bn critical minerals hoarding scheme called Project Vault. Because when you’ve allegedly "stopped" a conflict that is very much still ongoing, the logical next step is to freeze Congo’s tax and regulatory regime for a decade so American corporations can strip the place cleaner than Jared Kushner’s conscience.
While JD Vance holds a minerals summit like a cosplay version of the Berlin Conference, the administration is busy selling its raid on the Congo as a peace-and-prosperity plan that somehow forgets to include processing capacity, local value-add, or anything remotely resembling a path out of poverty for a country where four-fifths of the population lives below the poverty line. Meanwhile, the EU performs its usual impression of the "ethical" colonizer by quietly gutting corporate due diligence rules so nobody has to ask too many awkward questions about child labor, mine collapses, or rebels funding their insurgency with the same coltan that ends up in Western missiles and smartphones.
Global Witness notes that Trump’s sudden passion for critical minerals has less to do with solar panels and more to do with stuffing tantalum into jet engines and weapons systems, conveniently turning climate-transition materials into one more excuse for militarization. As M23 rebels rake in an estimated $800,000 a month from seized mines and Rwanda allegedly exports more coltan than it can possibly produce, Washington, Brussels, Beijing and Moscow all posture about stability while treating Congolese lives as just another input cost. The sales pitch is "strategic security" and "green tech"; the reality is the same old imperial resource grab with a fresh coat of ESG PowerPoint slides and a president bragging on TV that the victims asked him to take their stuff.
#imperialism#forever-grifting
epa to america: enjoy your lightly cancered soy
EPA officials carefully reviewing Bayer’s latest product label to confirm it contains the legally required number of meaningless safeguards.
The Trump EPA has heroically stepped in to protect the most vulnerable population in America: Bayer’s profit margins. The agency reapproved dicamba for spraying over genetically modified soybeans and cotton, despite years of complaints that the stuff wanders off like a drunk tourist and torches neighboring crops, trees, and basically anything green that wasn’t engineered in a lab. Courts blocked similar approvals in 2020 and 2024, but don’t worry, this time the EPA swears it’ll work because they’ve added rules. And as we all know, chemical drift molecules are famously meticulous about following federal regulations.
Even Kelly Ryerson of the Make America Healthy Again movement — the group that tried to form a fragile alliance with the Trump administration on, you know, not poisoning people — is openly saying this is a disaster. Environmental and health advocates point out that dicamba drift has already wrecked immense acreage and that research links exposure to higher risks of cancers like liver cancer and certain leukemias. The EPA’s response? Don’t be silly, we’ve got buffer zones and application limits now, and if farmers and applicators do everything perfectly under ideal conditions with no wind, no heat, and no human error, humans and the environment will be totally fine. Problem solved, science over.
The American Soybean Association is thrilled, naturally, because nothing says "modern agriculture" like being locked into a chemical treadmill you can’t step off without losing your entire harvest. Bayer is also delighted and is racing to get state approvals and roll out applicator training, presumably covering crucial safety topics like "try not to spray the neighbor’s orchard" and "pretend this label will save us in court." Meanwhile, the EPA continues its core mission under Trump: rebranding corporate appeasement as "supporting growers" and treating cancer risk as just another acceptable externality in the great American experiment of deregulated food roulette.
#forever-grifting#anti-science
trump admin discovers new medical specialty: prosecutorial pediatrics
Parishioners at the Church of Please Stop Hurting Kids hold signs reminding the government that trans humanity is not up for debate; unfortunately, the Trump administration RSVP’d "will persecute" instead of "will attend."
The Trump administration is thrilled that the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has issued a carefully hedged, non-binding statement suggesting gender-related surgery wait until 19 — so naturally Jim O'Neill and HHS are treating it like the Ten Commandments carved directly into a breast implant. A professional group says, "given the current state of the evidence and laws, maybe be cautious," and the White House hears, "praise be, our crusade is scientifically ordained."
The context, of course, is a country where 27 states have already banned gender-affirming care for minors and President Trump kicked off Term Two by signing an executive order declaring the federal government will not "fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support" any transition care for kids. Since then, HHS has pumped out a hit piece masquerading as a "report" on the research, CMS has warned state Medicaid directors to watch their backs, and the Department of Justice has decided its top priority is subpoenaing children’s hospitals like they’re running a cartel instead of a clinic.
Just to make sure the message lands, federal health officials have proposed a rule to yank all Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospitals that dare provide gender-affirming care to minors — a financial kill shot that would shut down entire institutions over what care they offer a tiny fraction of patients. Even before it’s finalized, the combo of that threat and a flood of HHS Inspector General investigations has been enough to start shuttering gender clinics nationwide. The administration calls this "protecting children." Everyone on the receiving end of the state’s coercive power recognizes it as what it is: using the federal purse and prosecutorial muscle to enforce ideology over medicine.
#killing-democracy#fascism#anti-science
trump turns the kennedy center into mar-a-logo for culture
Trump raises his fist at the Kennedy Center premiere of a Melania documentary, celebrating the successful conversion of a national arts institution into a personal fan club with better lighting.
Once upon a time, the Kennedy Center was a "living memorial" to John F. Kennedy and a home for Bernstein, Sondheim, August Wilson, ballet, jazz, and, worst of all in Trumpworld, drag queens and anti-racism programs. Fast forward to 2025 and Trump wakes up one morning, rage-posts on Truth Social that he's firing "multiple individuals" from the board, declares himself the "amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!", and announces that the nation's flagship arts center will now serve the sacred cause of ending youth drag exposure and hurt feelings on the right.
Staff found out about their new overlord from his social network tantrum, because of course they did. The long-time president, Deborah Rutter, is dumped and replaced with Ric Grenell, a professional Trump flack whose arts administration experience begins and ends with knowing how to clap at a camera. The social impact initiative created to do anti-racism and community outreach? Dissolved. Programs branded "too woke" are quietly buried, and the building sinks into a fog of depression while Trump insists he's rescuing the Kennedy Center from financial ruin that its own management says doesn’t exist.
Now artists like the Brentano String Quartet are refusing to play there at all, because walking on stage at the "Golden Age of Arts and Culture" feels less like honoring Kennedy’s legacy and more like performing at a campaign rally with better acoustics. The Kennedy Center, once a bipartisan cultural jewel on the Potomac, has been seized, purged, and repurposed as a taxpayer-subsidized shrine to grievance politics and presidential ego. The best is yet to come, he promises, as the national arts center gets slowly converted into a branded content studio for whatever culture-war stunt Trump dreams up next.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump jr helps turn democracy into a side bet
Donald Trump Jr, strategic advisor to the 'let’s bet on everything' industry, seen here workshopping new markets like 'Will Dad undermine democracy again? Yes/No/Already Happening.'
Giannis Antetokounmpo decided that being a beloved NBA star wasn’t quite enough and signed on as a shareholder and pitchman for Kalshi, a "prediction market" whose CEO proudly dreams of "financializing everything" – because what society really needed was to turn every disagreement, tragedy, and political crisis into a parlay. Under the second Trump administration, Kalshi has been allowed to roam free like a feral hedge fund, and it just so happens that Donald Trump Jr is a "strategic advisor" not only to Kalshi but also to its rival Polymarket. Just a normal country where the failson of the president helps gambling platforms monetize whether wars escalate or politicians wear the right color tie.
This is sold as harmless "opinion trading," but the reality is an ecosystem where athletes, media, and Trumpworld apparatchiks all profit off markets on real-world outcomes they can influence or at least shape the narrative around. LeBron shills DraftKings, Durant cashes FanDuel checks, Shams Charania accidentally moves betting lines with bad info, and the NBA commissioner politely shrugs while the league swims in gambling sponsorships. Now add Trump Jr, whose family already treats public office like a brand extension, helping prediction markets that host bets on geopolitical flashpoints and US political events – essentially turning democracy and foreign policy into a casino with better lobbyists.
The result is a quiet but steady collapse of trust: fans doubt whether players are competing or juicing lines, viewers wonder if media "scoops" are just market manipulation, and citizens get to watch Trump’s kid help build platforms where people literally wager on how badly government will fail. It’s not just sports that’s rigged for profit; it’s the whole civic sphere. But hey, we all on Kalshi now – or at least everyone who thinks governance is just another asset class and conflict of interest is a fun little side quest.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
maga turns a 1967 war crime mystery into a 2026 purity test
U.S.S. Liberty, now serving as a floating Rorschach test for whichever right-wing grifter needs content this week.
The American right has discovered the U.S.S. Liberty, a 1967 Israeli attack that killed 34 U.S. service members, and decided it’s not a tragedy or a historical dispute but a personality test for authoritarian fanboys. On one side, you’ve got Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, and Rich Lowry loudly insisting it was all a tragic mix-up, generously aligning their historical analysis with the official positions of both governments and their own donor base.
On the other side, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Paul Gosar have decided the Liberty is proof that Israel is an enemy of America, helpfully packaging legitimate questions about a murky incident with openly antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy sludge. The result: a six-decade-old naval disaster has been repurposed as a secret handshake inside Trump’s movement, where your take on a 1967 attack is really just a proxy for whether you’re a Christian Zionist hawk, a nationalist isolationist, or just deeply committed to hating Jews in new and exciting ways. Policy, strategy, actual alliances? Those are for democracies that still pretend to govern.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid
trump wants to nationalize elections, what could possibly go wrong
Trump dreams of running every election in America, surrounded by a lineup of secretary of state candidates auditioning to be assistant regional manager of voter suppression.
Trump is back in office, still lying about 2020, and now wants to "nationalize" elections — because if there’s one man you want in charge of every ballot in America, it’s the guy who tried to strong-arm Georgia into "finding" votes like they were lost car keys. While the Constitution says states run elections, the president is out here fantasizing about a federal takeover, and his administration is helpfully underscoring the point with FBI raids on local election hubs and federal lawsuits over voter rolls.
In Arizona, the GOP’s leading candidate for secretary of state is Alexander Kolodin — a proud member of Trump’s fake elector scheme and a walking conflict-of-interest case study who tried to sue Arizona out of recognizing Biden’s win. Trump hasn’t formally endorsed him, but Kolodin’s website features a glowing presidential review calling him “one hell of an attorney,” which is certainly one way to describe someone who worked to overturn an election. Democrats, meanwhile, are reduced to running on the radical notion that elections should be real and count the actual votes.
Georgia, the site of Trump’s famous "find 11,780 votes" audition tape, is now hosting a secretary of state race shaped by an FBI search of a Fulton County election hub. Brad Raffensperger — who once mildly resisted a coup and is now treated as a hero for doing the bare minimum of not committing felonies — is running for governor, and his would-be successors are a mix of "please don’t federalize this" Republicans like Gabriel Sterling and Trump-pilled loyalists like Vernon Jones, who calls himself “the Black Donald Trump” and then acts accordingly by refusing to say whether he supports Trump’s nationalization fantasy while hinting that something must be wrong if the FBI has questions.
Democrats in multiple battleground states are campaigning on the quaint idea that elections should be free, fair, and not centrally managed by the guy who keeps insisting they’re rigged when he loses. Republicans, for their part, are largely running on "concerns" about 2020 and a shared commitment to backing Trump’s lies while pretending this is all about "election integrity." The bad news: the election denial movement now has the White House, a DOJ willing to poke at local election offices, and a bench of secretary of state candidates eager to hold the keys to the ballot box. The good news: at least they’re saying the quiet part out loud now.
#killing-democracy#fascism
state terror, now with a constitution and a corporate sponsor
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, confidently demonstrating how to do state terror but with a press release and a legal memo.
Janine di Giovanni, who used to document actual dictators – Assad, Saddam, Sisi, Putin – is now looking at the US and Israel and going: yep, this is starting to rhyme. After decades of watching masked men drag people from their homes and regimes build hotels over mass graves, she’s seeing the upgraded Western version: the same terror logic, just run through a legal department and a PR firm.
Instead of midnight knocks from secret police, we get ICE raids wrapped in the language of "order" and "procedure". Instead of a state TV stooge, we get a CBS boss whose politics align beautifully with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead of openly murdering journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, we discipline reporters with "editorial policy" – and then, when that’s not enough, we start arresting them and flirting with calling them enemies of the state. Democracy, but make it plausible deniability.
Campus life, once about reading books and discovering bad beer, is now a soft launch for surveillance states. Universities photograph and catalogue pro-Palestinian students like they’re shoplifters, whisper that Wall Street and top law firms will blacklist them, and help ICE try to deport the especially inconvenient ones. Deans are threatened with funding cuts unless they install ideologically convenient “antisemitism” trainings that students say are just pro-Israel propaganda with a quiz at the end.
The genius of the modern "democratic" terror state is that everything is technically legal. Courts still exist, elections still happen, the press is "free" – while CEOs, academics, and journalists quietly pre-censor themselves, obeying in advance like Timothy Snyder’s warning label come to life. The masks may be off, but the methods are familiar: make people scared enough, compliant enough, and eventually you don’t need to announce the repression. It just seeps into the machinery and starts calling itself normal.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s ice kills, cops arrest the mourners
Minneapolis police bravely confront the terrifying threat of candles, cardboard signs, and a guy holding a pizza box.
In Minneapolis, the Trump administration’s immigration crusade has reached the "arrest people mourning the dead" phase of law and order. Protesters marking one month since ICE officer(s) shot and killed 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good outside her home gathered near the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building. Police responded to this dangerous mix of candles, grief, and constitutional rights by declaring the assembly unlawful and hauling people off the sidewalk, including a guy whose radical crime was delivering pizza.
Good was killed after ICE boxed in her SUV and an officer standing in front of her car opened fire at close range as it moved forward. The Trump administration immediately branded her a "domestic terrorist" who tried to run over an officer, a story state and local officials politely filed under "absolutely not." Weeks later, Alex Pretti was shot dead by immigration officers during a street scuffle after they noticed a gun he was legally licensed to carry. Two dead, both caught on bystander video, both now symbols of Trump’s "public safety" campaign that keeps killing the public.
Border czar Tom Homan, apparently confusing Minnesota for a hostile foreign province, announced he’d graciously pull 700 immigration officers out of the state—only a quarter of the federal occupation force—after local officials agreed to help turn over arrested immigrants. No timeline on when the crackdown ends, because why let a crisis go to waste when you can squeeze more compliance out of terrified communities. Meanwhile, hundreds gathered in a park for a ceremony led by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, honoring Good and Pretti while Becca Good reminded the country that there are many more victims whose names we don’t know yet, quietly ground up in Trump’s deportation machine.
So to recap: ICE kills two people, the White House smears one as a terrorist, local cops arrest the people protesting the killings, and the feds negotiate how much cooperation they can extract in exchange for dialing back the siege. Truly a shining example of how to run an immigration system if your policy goals are fear, silence, and a body count.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump administration bravely takes on its toughest foe yet: a five-year-old in a bunny hat
Pictured: the national security emergency currently terrifying the Trump administration – a five-year-old in a bunny hat who dared to seek asylum legally.
The Trump administration has located the gravest threat to the republic, and it is a five-year-old Ecuadorian boy in a bunny hat. After a judge ordered Liam Conejo Ramos and his father released from a notorious Texas family detention facility, Department of Homeland Security lawyers are now trying to deport them anyway, helpfully demonstrating that in Trump’s America, a court order is more of a suggestion than a constraint.
DHS insists this is all just "standard procedure" and totally not retaliatory, as they move to end the family’s asylum claims and push removal proceedings against people who entered legally as asylum applicants. Representative Joaquin Castro, who helped escort Liam home to Minnesota after the child spent ten days in a trailer prison getting sick and terrified of guards, says the administration is "trying to take him again" and breaking precedent to do it. So yes, the government that can’t manage basic governance is extremely efficient at hunting down kindergarteners.
This is not a one-off horror story; it’s the business model. ICE booked about 3,800 minors into family detention from January to October 2025, including toddlers, with more than 2,600 kids grabbed inside the country, far from any border. The message from Trump’s DHS is clear: if you legally seek asylum, we might lock your children in a trailer, ignore judges, and try to deport you anyway — all while insisting, with a straight face, that there’s "nothing retaliatory" about it. Bold strategy to make "we terrorize little kids" the core brand of federal law enforcement.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
dni tulsi gabbard personally walks intel about trump call into the political spin cycle
Tulsi Gabbard, hard at work transforming the Office of the Director of National Intelligence into the Office of Protecting the President From Inconvenient Phone Calls.
The NSA reportedly picks up an "unusual" phone call between a foreign intelligence figure and someone close to Donald Trump, flags it up the chain, and then watches in horror as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard treats it like a hot gossip item for the West Wing. Instead of letting the NSA distribute the intel through normal channels, Gabbard allegedly prints it out and hand-delivers it to Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, then orders the agency not to publish the report and to send everything straight to her office. National security process, meet Office Politics: Executive Edition.
A whistleblower, apparently under the impression that laws still apply, files an "urgent concern" complaint in April and a formal one in May. By June, the acting IG Tamara A Johnson shrugs and declares she "could not determine" if the allegations are credible, but magnanimously notes the whistleblower can go to Congress… after getting guidance from the very DNI they’re accusing. Conveniently, Gabbard then parks one of her top advisers, Dennis Kirk, inside the supposedly independent watchdog’s office. Totally normal oversight structure, nothing capture-y about it at all.
For eight months, the complaint and the underlying intel are locked down, redacted to oblivion, and smothered under claims of executive privilege, because nothing says "this is fine" like invoking presidential secrecy over a mystery call involving foreign intel and a Trump-world insider. The "gang of eight" finally gets a heavily blacked-out version in February, well past the 21-day statutory deadline that Senator Mark Warner helpfully reminds everyone still exists on paper. Republicans like Tom Cotton rush to declare that Gabbard handled everything "appropriately", while Democrats point out that burying a whistleblower complaint for most of a year is not actually in the job description.
Now Congress is trying to pry the original NSA intel directly from the agency, the whistleblower’s lawyer Andrew Bakaj is publicly begging ODNI to follow the law, and the DNI’s office is ghosting his letters like a bad Tinder date. The administration’s message is clear: if intelligence suggests uncomfortable questions about Trump’s orbit and foreign services, the real national security priority is protecting the president’s political flank, not the country. America’s intelligence system has been repurposed into a personal damage-control shop, and they’re not even subtle about it.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump demands naming rights to basic infrastructure, judge says no
Artist’s rendering of the Hudson River tunnel, bravely attempting to remain functional while the president negotiates whether it’s named after him.
Donald Trump tried to turn a $16bn life-or-death rail tunnel under the Hudson into his own personal GoFundMe for ego, freezing reimbursements on the crucial Gateway Project while allegedly hinting that, for the low low price of renaming Penn Station and Washington Dulles after him, maybe commuters wouldn’t have to die in a collapsing, Sandy-damaged tunnel. New York and New Jersey called that a "brazen act of political retribution"; a federal judge translated that into legalese as "arbitrary" and procedurally illegal, and temporarily unfroze the money before the nation’s busiest passenger rail line finished crumbling into the river.
Instead of fixing century-old infrastructure used by 200,000 travelers and 425 trains a day, the Trump administration discovered a brand-new civil rights concern: they suddenly had to freeze funds to review whether the project complied with fresh bans on race- and sex-based contracting considerations. The Gateway Development Commission said it fixed everything and heard nothing back, while 1,000 workers were about to be benched and passengers were stuck relying on what is politely described as "decaying" infrastructure and less politely described as "a steel coffin with delays."
Trump, naturally, denied ever pushing to slap his name on Dulles or Penn Station, then immediately claimed Chuck Schumer wanted to rename Penn for him, which Schumer called an "absolute lie"—a phrase that doubles nicely as a working title for most Trump infrastructure policy. State AGs Letitia James and Jennifer Davenport cheered the ruling, while senators Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand pointed out that the president was literally holding a tunnel hostage to his own narcissism. America: where even basic train safety has to fight its way past a presidential branding deal.
#retribution#forever-grifting
bezos spends $70m on melania fanfic, calls it cinema
Melania takes a call, presumably to confirm the check from Bezos cleared before she continues pretending this is a documentary and not a $70m campaign ad.
Amazon drops $70m on a Melania Trump documentary covering the 20 days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration and, shockingly, it’s not a hard-hitting exploration of fascism so much as a glossy brochure for life in the gilded bunker. The box office haul? $7m – which in Trumpworld apparently counts as a roaring success, making it the top documentary of the decade and also a spectacular way for Jeff Bezos to light piles of money on fire in exchange for the faint hope of regime goodwill.
Republican women, meanwhile, are treating this like Barbie for people who think Stephen Miller is a serious policy mind. In Austin, they show up to the AMC in “what would Melania wear?” power suits and leather pants, turning state propaganda into girls’ night while Cecilia Abbott, wife of Greg Abbott, slips in with a security detail like she’s attending the Met Gala instead of a 2-hour soft-focus ad for authoritarian chic. Former Trump press secretary turned Fox fog machine Kayleigh McEnany brags her mom’s screening was “standing room only”, helpfully confirming she has no idea how movie theaters or basic counting work.
The audience is, predictably, older, white, and very into the idea that watching a carefully curated, context-free portrait of Melania’s outfits and “vulnerability” is the same thing as engaging with history. Influencers from the conservative “womanosphere” push it as must-see content for tradwives, while Katie Miller somehow blames South Africa for pulling the film because they’re “biased against white people” – a bold take from the spouse of the guy who built family separation as a lifestyle brand. It’s all pitched as a story of grace under pressure, with the minor omission that the pressure largely comes from the administration dismantling democracy in the background.
So yes, while the rest of us remember child separation, coups, and open contempt for the rule of law, Amazon is out here funding a Jackie Kennedy cosplay reel for a first lady who spent four years decorating the White House like a Slavic horror maze. State-aligned billionaires pumping out prestige propaganda for an aging base desperate to feel persecuted and glamorous at the same time – what could possibly go wrong?
#killing-democracy#oligarchy#forever-grifting
trump discovers new foreign conflicts, voters discover they’re still hostages
Stock photo of Trump looking serious at a map he definitely has not read, while poll numbers cower in the corner.
NPR does its polite public-radio best to summarize the week where Donald Trump kept collecting foreign conflicts like they’re NFT drops, while voters quietly told pollsters they’re exhausted, broke, and somehow still being asked whether immigrants are the real problem. The Trump administration’s idea of “engagement” abroad appears to be a mix of impulsive saber-rattling and vibes-based geopolitics, with the rest of the world playing the role of unpaid extra in his never-ending reality show.
The poll, meanwhile, reveals the usual fun-house mirror of American priorities: people are worried about the economy hollowed out by oligarchs, but get handed another round of fearmongering about the border; they want stability, but are offered a president who treats foreign policy like live-tweeting a bar fight. So yes, democracy is technically still here, but it’s mostly being used as a focus group for whichever foreign dust-up Trump wants to wander into next.
#imperialism#anti-immigration
trump solves housing crisis by hoping poor people stop whining
Trump explains that housing is very affordable, as long as you bought in 1993 and already own three of them.
Trump has finally cracked the housing crisis: just say the quiet part out loud and call it policy. At a cabinet meeting, he proudly announced he wants to drive housing prices up for people who already own homes, and explicitly doesn’t want to "destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home". Translation: if you don’t already have an asset to be inflated by government-sanctioned money firehoses, kindly stay in your rental cage and stop disturbing the homeowners’ equity worship service.
This is the same guy who campaigned on cutting the cost of a new home in half by deregulating construction, apparently without noticing that flooding the market with cheaper starter homes would, you know, lower prices on existing homes. Now he’s reportedly eyeing his Fed chair nominee, Kevin Warsh, like a guy wondering how hard he can lean on the central bank to goose asset prices while pretending it’s about affordability. Nothing says “independent monetary policy” like treating the Fed as your personal Zillow optimization tool.
Meanwhile, actual research (the thing this administration keeps losing fights against) points out that prices are being driven by rising inequality and high-paid, college-educated workers bidding up urban housing, while non-college workers get buried. Even in deregulation poster child Houston, rents quadrupled right along with educated-worker wages. The math is bleak: even if cities somehow hit top-tier construction growth, it could still take decades to a full century to make a median one-bedroom affordable for a median non-college worker in places like New York or San Francisco. But sure, let’s keep chanting "build baby build" and pretending ICE raids and zoning rollbacks are a housing policy instead of a vibes-based gift basket for landlords.
The punchline: deregulation alone won’t fix it, rent control alone won’t fix it, and absolutely nothing in Trump’s "let prices rip, protect the asset class" approach is aimed at making homes livable for workers rather than balance-sheet ornaments for owners. The administration’s real housing strategy is simple: inflate the portfolios of people who already have something to protect, and treat everyone else like a statistical inconvenience cluttering up the charts.
#forever-grifting#money
state department to america: please submit a foia request for reality
The State Department, where even the sign out front may soon require a FOIA request to verify it ever existed.
The State Department has decided that history is need-to-know, and the public does not need to know. All posts on its official X accounts from before Trump’s glorious second coming on Jan. 20, 2025 — including from Obama, Biden, and Trump’s own first term — are being wiped from public view and shoved into an internal archive. If you want to see what your government said in the recent past, you can now enjoy the uniquely American experience of filing a FOIA request and waiting months to maybe learn what was once a public tweet.
This is not an isolated clerical tidy-up; it’s part of the administration’s larger "Delete Anything That Makes Us Look Bad Or Real" program. Environmental and health data? Scrubbed. Mentions of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities? Vanished. National park signs that admit slavery happened? Gone. References to Trump’s impeachments at the National Portrait Gallery? Erased. In their place: a White House "revisionist history" of Jan. 6 and a COVID page titled "Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19", because why have science when you can have fan fiction?
A State Department spokesperson swears this is all about avoiding "confusion" and "speaking with one voice" to advance the President’s "America First" goals. Translation: if it didn’t serve the current cult narrative, it goes behind the curtain. Public-facing records are out; curated propaganda feeds are in. The history is technically "preserved," they insist — just not where the public, journalists, or foreign audiences can see it without legal gymnastics. You know, the kind of transparent, accountable diplomacy you expect from a government that keeps needing to reassure everyone it’s definitely not sliding into authoritarianism.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s export-grade fascism hits the european market
Le Pen, Orbán, and friends waiting for the next tranche of moral support from Washington’s Department of Export-Grade Authoritarianism.
European leaders are apparently worried Trump might invade a NATO ally or hand the continent to Putin, which is adorable, because the actual plan is much cheaper: just help elect a bunch of homegrown mini-Trumps and call it a "second American revolution." The new U.S. National Security Strategy literally name-checks far-right parties like Reform UK, AfD, Le Pen’s RN, Fidesz, and Vox as "patriotic" partners, because nothing says safeguarding freedom like using state power to boost movements with ex–neo-Nazi intellectuals on the payroll.
This "new right" isn’t pretending to be nostalgic anymore; it’s proudly hyper-modern, exploiting every crisis from 2008 to Covid to Ukraine as proof that liberal democracy is a failed product and only ethnonational border fetishism can save us. The formula is simple: turn borders into moral sorting hats, tariffs into culture-war cosplay, foreign policy into "what’s in it for us," and any institutional oversight into a sinister "deep state" conspiracy. Then have Elon Musk and friends launder it all through an algorithmic funhouse where "free speech" means infinite disinfo, and obscure activists become martyrs in a parallel reality most normal people don’t even see.
Mainstream parties, being extremely good at losing, either ignore the threat or try to copy the rhetoric on migration and identity, which naturally just makes the originals look more authentic. Meanwhile, Trump and JD Vance are busy turning the U.S. government into an international far-right venture capital fund, underwriting parties that exist to dismantle the very liberal order NATO was built to protect. So no, Europe doesn’t need to fear an American tank division rolling through Berlin; it needs to worry about Washington sending memes, money, and moral support to the people who want to shut democracy down from the inside.
#killing-democracy#fascism#oligarchy
global patriarchy, brought to you by the epstein vip lounge
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, co-chairs of the Global Elite Misogyny & Sex Crimes Council, posing like this is all perfectly normal.
Welcome to the Epstein files, where the world’s most important men gather to solve the great questions of our age: how to get the UN secretary general, a former defense secretary, a White House comms director, a few billionaires, and maybe one woman ("Anne Hathaway (really)") to the same dinner table without accidentally implying that women are people. The Department of Justice’s email dump reads like a networking guide for the global ruling class: men get invited as "interesting" minds, and women get invited as snacks, assistants, or bodies to be upgraded like a used Tesla.
On one email track, Epstein is telling Richard Branson that the head of the Nobel Peace Prize committee is crashing at his place and might be a fun contact. On the other, he’s telling a woman: "Take a selfie of your pussy and send." That’s the split-screen: powerful men get cultivated, traded, and flattered; women get told to fix their teeth, lose weight, treat their STDs, and maybe consider a little nose reduction before 23. The patriarchy isn’t a theory here, it’s a shared inbox.
The machinery runs on women doing unpaid emotional and logistical labor so the boys’ club can keep circulating the globe in private jets pretending their dinner parties are geopolitics. Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff coordinates helicopters, Paris–LA–NY–London routes, and "snack-y" treats for VIPs like Larry Summers while syncing with other billionaires’ female staff to make sure Richard Branson’s sauvignon blanc and sugar-free dessert needs are met. Meanwhile, when Epstein wants seminars on "power" and "money," his invite list is a roll call of tech bros, ex-presidents, and finance guys—zero women, naturally. Women can organize the calendar, arrange the menu, and supply the sex, but the table itself? That’s reserved for the men deciding how the world works.
#oligarchy#perverts
pentagon declares war on harvard, recruits only from trump university of vibes
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth heroically protects America from the grave national security threat of people who read books at Harvard.
Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend host currently LARPing as defense secretary, has announced that the Pentagon will cut off all military training, fellowships and certificate programs with Harvard because it’s too "woke" and allegedly full of "Hate America activism". A proud Harvard graduate himself, Hegseth bravely omitted the part where he cashed in on a Kennedy School master’s degree before deciding that higher education is treason.
This isn’t just a tantrum about campus politics; it’s the Trump administration turning the Defense Department into an ideological enforcement arm. Hegseth says the Pentagon’s focus on "building lethality" means no more "millions of dollars" for "expensive universities" that don’t sufficiently worship the troops or the Dear Leader, and he’s ordering all branches to review every Ivy League and civilian grad program for active-duty service members. Translation: if your university teaches anything beyond flag worship and culture-war talking points, the pipeline of military students and funding is on the chopping block.
The same guy who once theatrically defaced his Harvard diploma on Fox & Friends – then immediately admitted it was just a stunt and that, yes, he’s still keeping the degree – is now using the Pentagon to make that stunt national policy. The message to the officer corps is clear: loyalty to Trumpist ideology outranks professional education. "We train warriors, not wokesters," Hegseth sneers, as the world’s most powerful military is methodically rewired to fear critical thinking more than actual enemies.
#killing-democracy#fascism
