neighbors form neighborhood watch against fascism
St. Paul students walk out against ICE, apparently under the mistaken impression that federal law enforcement shouldn’t function like an occupying army.
Trump sent thousands of immigration agents into Minnesota, killed two residents, deported hundreds, and apparently expected everyone to just bake a casserole and move on. Instead, neighbors built a block-by-block surveillance network on ICE, got kids to school past federal shock troops, and documented the administration’s little domestic war game, "Operation Metro Surge" – because nothing says "limited government" like flooding a state with armed agents.
Now those same people are doing what America’s institutions were allegedly built to do but no longer can: they’re running "democracy defense" trainings in church basements, teaching folks how to help every neighbor vote and how to respond when Trump inevitably screams fraud the moment he doesn’t like the numbers. They’re gaming out election sabotage scenarios because the president has already tried to delegitimize California’s elections and has packed the federal government with loyalists who think the Constitution is a vibes-based suggestion.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice – remember when that meant something? – has charged nearly 40 people over a church protest and slapped 15 more Minnesotans with sweeping conspiracy charges for daring to resist ICE, a pattern Protect Democracy politely describes as part of a "disrupt" strategy to weaponize federal power against critics. So while state officials scramble to harden election procedures and fend off federal meddling, regular people are left to run the last functioning branch of government: the neighborhood. The plan is simple: precinct by precinct, block by block, out-organize the guy who’s trying to turn law enforcement and elections into his personal reality show elimination round.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
earthquakes hit venezuela, trump tests theory that you don’t need an aid agency
Marco Rubio announces a ‘big, fast, effective’ response to Venezuela’s earthquakes, bravely attempting to reinvent USAID from the smoking crater where the administration left it.
The Trump administration just got its first big test of the "who needs professionals when you have vibes" doctrine. After literally kidnapping Nicolás Maduro in a January special forces raid and installing a more compliant Delcy Rodríguez, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now trying to run a massive disaster response in Venezuela without the US Agency for International Development, which they helpfully gutted and folded into the State Department. Thousands of experienced aid workers? Laid off. Regional networks and NGO relationships? Shredded. But don’t worry, Marco says it’ll be "big, fast, effective" – like a used car ad, but for earthquake relief.
Trump is busy congratulating himself for this "happy country" where people are supposedly "dancing in the streets" between aftershocks and mass casualties, proudly noting that the US has "taken out millions of barrels of oil" and "paid for the war many times over." So yes, the official line is: we toppled your government, siphoned your oil, and now that 920+ people are dead in earthquakes, we’re generously sending $150m in disaster aid and some search-and-rescue teams so the interim regime we like doesn’t collapse on live TV. This isn’t humanitarian assistance; it’s a loyalty rewards program for compliant governments, with the State Department cosplaying USAID because Trump decided multilateral health cooperation and professional disaster infrastructure were for losers.
Experts politely point out that the US has already blown previous crises by torching international partnerships – like the Ebola outbreak the US learned about late after ditching the WHO – and that the old USAID mission in Colombia went from 144 staff to 14, taking decades of local ties down with it. Now the same hollowed-out apparatus is trying to manage a Haiti-level disaster while the White House frantically overcompensates to avoid another paper-towel-throwing moment. The administration calls it a "whole-of-government" response; everyone else recognizes it as a live-fire demonstration of how you turn a humanitarian tool into an extension of regime-change policy and oil accounting.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
oklahoma highway cop promoted to chief deportation officer
An ICE agent, soon to be supervised by Oklahoma’s finest export: a highway cop promoted to national deportation czar.
Donald Trump has decided that what America’s sprawling deportation force really needs is a former Oklahoma state trooper with a Marine Corps background and a Truth Social fan club. Enter Lance Schroyer, currently senior adviser to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, now tapped to run ICE — the agency already under fire for its “aggressive immigration tactics”, which is NPR-speak for raids, terrorizing communities, and creative constitutional interpretation.
Trump hailed Schroyer as a “PATRIOT” with decades of experience “locking up the worst of the worst”, which in Trump-world now apparently includes anyone whose paperwork isn’t in a three-ring binder. Mullin, a fellow Oklahoman and former congressman who’s been turning DHS into a regional franchise of the panhandle, cheered that Schroyer will help fulfill the president’s “mandate” to “target, arrest, and deport illegal aliens.” Policy nuance has left the chat; mass targeting is the brand.
Schroyer has been overseeing “coordination of immigration enforcement” from inside DHS, which is a polite way of saying he’s already been helping run the crackdown; now they just want to slap a Senate confirmation on it for legitimacy cosplay. ICE hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed director since the Obama era, but sure, this is the guy we’re going to normalize. The nation’s premier deportation agency is being handed to a loyal enforcer from the Markwayne Mullin orbit, because nothing says independent law enforcement like a tightly knit Oklahoma patronage circle with a mandate to hunt down immigrants.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
trump slaps his face on your passport, calls it patriotism
State Department mock-up of the new ‘patriot passport,’ thoughtfully redesigned so your travel documents now double as limited-edition Trump fan merch.
The White House has unveiled the new “patriot passport,” a limited-edition US passport thoughtfully redesigned so that when you travel abroad, foreign officials can immediately identify you as a citizen of a country run by a guy who watermarks his own face on federal documents. The original stern headshot of Donald Trump has been upgraded to an even sterner three-quarter-length portrait of him leaning over the Resolute Desk with balled fists, because nothing says 250 years of democracy like a leader posed like he’s about to negotiate a plea deal.
Trump’s portrait is now surrounded by text from the Declaration of Independence, with his signature and “United States of America” underneath, as if Jefferson’s ghost were quietly sobbing in the corner. On the facing page, the Founding Fathers sign the Declaration while, on the opposite side, modern America’s founding father of tacky authoritarian branding glowers over them. The back cover now boasts a "Freedom 250" gold flag, because if there’s one thing this administration understands, it’s that freedom must be heavily logo’d.
This rollout pairs nicely with Trump’s planned 250th anniversary solid-gold coin, featuring the same image and the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” – his post-assassination-attempt rally chant, now repurposed as official state merch. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have pointed out that some of the coin’s gold may be linked to illegal mining and exploitation, and that the whole project is “more befitting a monarchy than a democracy.” The administration’s response appears to be: exactly. Why settle for a republic when you can have a commemorative personality cult starter pack – complete with passport, coin, and the creeping sense that you’re living through the world’s tackiest soft launch of American monarchy?
#killing-democracy#fascism#forever-grifting
trump epa heroically fights for americans’ right to breathe soot
EPA leadership gazes proudly at a smokestack, wondering how many hospital visits per quarter really count as overregulation.
A federal appeals court just told Lee Zeldin’s Trump-run EPA that its attempt to abandon Biden’s tougher soot pollution rule “lacks merit,” which is lawyer-speak for please stop embarrassing yourselves. The court left in place the 2024 standard cutting allowable fine particle pollution from 12 to 9 micrograms per cubic meter — the kind of boring little number that translates into 4,500 fewer premature deaths, thousands fewer asthma attacks, and fewer hospital visits, which the administration apparently found offensively pro-human.
Instead of implementing the rule, Trump’s EPA eagerly teamed up with 25 Republican-led states and assorted industry groups to argue that maybe the government should consider the real victims here: coal plants and manufacturers whose profits might be mildly inconvenienced by people not dying as fast. An EPA spokesperson even complained the rule would cost “hundreds of millions, if not billions” to Americans, generously redefining “Americans” to mean “corporate balance sheets.” Meanwhile, environmental groups are stuck celebrating a court decision that forces the environmental agency to do its own job and stop literally catering to polluters while millions keep breathing unhealthy air.
So the current state of environmental policy: the Clean Air Act, medical science, and basic survival on one side; Trump, Zeldin, and the coal lobby on the other. The courts, for now, are still siding with lungs over lobbyists — but the EPA is “reviewing the decision,” which is bureaucratic for how else can we stall this while people choke on soot?
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
maga cage match accidentally books real death cult
Live from the White House Octagon: one president, several Nazis, a drone or two, and American democracy tapping out in the first round.
The Trump White House decided the presidency wasn’t enough of a circus and hosted a UFC event on the lawn, because why merely erode democratic norms when you can ground-and-pound them on pay-per-view. According to the DOJ, a group of far-right, Christian-extremist, Nazi-curious twenty‑somethings allegedly chose this presidential fight night as the perfect venue for a drone-bomb-and-sniper assassination plot targeting Trump and other officials. Phase one: a protest to distract cops. Phase two: drone-borne explosives over the crowd. Phase three: marksmen picking off "high‑value targets" as panicked VIPs flee toward the kill zone. A second wave would storm the White House. One of them called it "a fucking bloodbath" – so, you know, just wholesome Christian nationalism vibes.
The alleged ringleaders marinated in TikTok, encrypted chats and Q‑adjacent fantasies about an "Epstein class" of elites, mixing antisemitism, infant‑sacrifice delusions, and Hitler fanboying into one big accelerationist stew. They used a left‑wing AIPAC-tracking site to pick targets, then wrapped it all in Bible cosplay about "shepherds" and "lions’ dens" while fantasizing about kicking off a second American Revolution. The same movement that Trump weaponized is now so radicalized it’s trying to kill him for not being extreme enough – which is one hell of a customer service problem for authoritarian politics.
The Trump administration’s response has been to both claim credit and shrug it off. JD Vance praised the FBI, then immediately minimized the plot as "not that advanced" – always reassuring to hear about a foiled drone and sniper massacre at the White House described like a half-finished book report. Right-wing media, meanwhile, frantically tried to rebrand the far-right conspirators as secret leftists because one of them repeated Trump’s own Epstein conspiracies back at him. While scholars point out there’s now an "ideological civil war" inside the Christian nationalist right – Israel hawks vs. America First antisemites – the throughline is clear: Trump’s movement mainstreamed the paranoia, the Christian nationalist rhetoric, and the conspiracy infrastructure. Now the monster is pointing its rifles at the ringmaster while everyone pretends this is just another news cycle instead of a flashing neon sign that the democracy death spiral is accelerating.
#killing-democracy#fascism
supreme court to haitians: thanks for saving our town, now get out
Springfield residents at a vigil discovering that in Trump’s America, the real crime is Haitians opening too many successful businesses.
Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community went from cheering their first World Cup in half a century to wondering how fast they need to disappear before ICE shows up, courtesy of a 6-3 supreme court ruling doing PR work for Stephen Miller’s vision board. The court’s conservative supermajority happily paused lower-court protections so the Trump administration can yank Temporary Protected Status from about 350,000 Haitians and thousands of Syrians, and potentially set up a mass "de-documentation" campaign against up to 1.3 million people. You come here after an earthquake and state collapse, rebuild a dying Rust Belt town, pay taxes, keep factories running, and in return you get deportation papers and a presidential smear campaign about eating pets.
This is the same Springfield Trump turned into a racist carnival attraction in 2024 by falsely claiming Haitian immigrants were snacking on cats and dogs, which of course summoned bomb threats and white-supremacist marches like moths to a tiki torch. Now, after years of Haitians opening businesses, boosting municipal revenue, and literally keeping the local high school soccer team competitive, the federal government has decided the real emergency is that these families might continue living normal lives. Even Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine is calling the ruling a “mistake” while noting that Haiti is run by gangs, its government barely functions, and the economy is rubble—so naturally that’s where we’re sending people back.
For extra moral whiplash, Justice Amy Coney Barrett—who adopted two children from Haiti—joined the majority to make sure other Haitian kids can be "reunited" with gang-controlled streets, kidnapping, and state collapse. Locals at a vigil are left asking how someone who flies the banner of Christian compassion can sign off on a policy that, as one Springfield resident put it, sends people "back to their deaths". But the Trump administration gets its white-nationalist policy win, the court flexes its loyalty, and a thriving Midwestern community is told that learning English, getting jobs, and following the rules was just a temporary condition. Welcome to TPS under Trump: Temporary Protected Status, permanently revoked.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
trump launches trade war to protect poor, struggling billion‑dollar tech companies
Trump, mid-rant, explaining that a Truth Social post now counts as a legally binding amendment to every trade deal on earth.
Donald Trump hopped on Truth Social to announce that if any European country dares to tax digital services from US tech giants, he’ll slap a 100% tariff on “any and all Goods” they send to the US. Not content with basic trade brinkmanship, he also declared that his tariff tantrum would “supersede any other prior trade deals” – because why let months of actual negotiations get in the way of a post written in all caps to defend Apple, Google, and Amazon’s delicate feelings.
European countries like France, Spain, Italy and the UK have modest digital services taxes – we’re talking 2–3% on enormous, data-hoovering platforms – that apply to all big companies, not just American ones. These taxes are already raising serious money, so naturally Trump has decided they’re an intolerable assault on the sacred right of US tech monopolies to profit everywhere and pay taxes nowhere. The EU, which just signed a deal with the US capping most tariffs at 15%, is now politely explaining that no, a Truth Social meltdown does not magically rewrite the agreement, and yes, they will "respond swiftly and decisively" if he tries.
So while European governments are trying to figure out how to tax digital behemoths that operate like unregulated infrastructure, the President of the United States is threatening a full-scale trade war to make sure those companies never have to chip in for the societies they profit from. It’s less "America First" and more Tax Justice Last, Share Price First – with the entire transatlantic economy held hostage to Trump’s latest attempt at being the world’s most aggressive corporate lobbyist.
#trade-war#forever-grifting
jd vance explains that crimes are fine now, actually
JD Vance at the Nixon Library, explaining that the real Watergate scandal was consequences.
Vice President JD Vance went to the Nixon Library and, instead of quietly reflecting on the whole "criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice" thing, decided to hold a TED Talk on why Watergate would barely trend on X today. According to Vance, if Watergate happened now it would be a 12-hour story, and the real lesson is that the same sinister "deep state" that took down Nixon also tried to take down Trump. The minor historical detail that Nixon was brought down by his own appointees, a special prosecutor, a functioning Justice Department, and Republicans who still remembered what shame felt like did not make the cut in his remarks.
The article points out that Vance is less wrong about history than he is accidentally honest about the present: scandals now burn out faster than a Truth Social IPO. Presidential insider trading, donor pardons, government-as-telethon branding schemes, sweetheart contracts for friends, and even elective surgery on national landmarks all blur into one continuous outrage montage that voters are told to treat as "just vibes." Vance's message is clear: the problem wasn’t that Nixon committed crimes; the problem was that anyone cared enough to stop him. Watergate as a blip isn’t a prediction — it’s the governing model.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
louisiana gop fights over who loves trump enough to kill the filibuster
Trump Republicans in Louisiana carefully weighing which candidate will more eagerly blow up the filibuster to "save" elections from voters.
Louisiana Republicans are holding a Senate primary runoff to determine which candidate will more enthusiastically help Donald Trump light what’s left of American democracy on fire. On one side, you’ve got Rep. Julia Letlow, proudly endorsed by Trump and promising to back his so-called SAVE America Act — a sweeping election-law overhaul that she says is so vital the Senate should nuke the filibuster to pass it. On the other side is John Fleming, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus and former Trump administration official, arguing that he’s actually the real MAGA conservative because he’s been voting hard-right since before it was cool.
The big ideological split? Not policy — both basically agree they’d torch Senate rules to push Trump’s election agenda — but who has the more authentic brand of devotion to the Dear Leader. Letlow pitches herself as Trump’s chosen “fearless champion,” while Fleming insists he can still win over Trump’s base even though Trump already picked someone else, because apparently being called “fantastic” in a phone call now counts as a governing credential.
Just to keep things classy, Fleming boosted an AI-generated deepfake video mocking Letlow’s dead husband and her succession to his House seat, then shrugged that “parody ads are OK” before quietly deleting it. In a normal political party, that might be disqualifying; in today’s GOP, it just earned him a mild scolding and helped consolidate the Trumpist establishment — Steve Scalise, Clay Higgins, and a tele-rallying Trump himself — behind Letlow. The result is a runoff where the central question isn’t whether to undermine democratic safeguards, but which candidate gets to do it under official MAGA branding.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump turns italy policy into a breakup text
Giorgia Meloni and Donald Trump pretend to be strategic partners, moments before he tells TV audiences she begged him for a selfie and she reminds him that, unlike his legal cases, Italy still has a constitution.
Giorgia Meloni spent years sanding down her post-fascist edges so she could be the respectable face of the European right and Trump’s favorite continental cosplay partner. She got the photo ops, the White House invite, the whole "I’m a serious stateswoman" starter pack. Then Trump did what Trump always does: turned foreign policy into a petty loyalty test and a personal humiliation game, this time over war with Iran and a Pope who had the audacity to not be sufficiently bloodthirsty.
The Italian government, bound by a constitution and a public that doesn’t love endless Middle East wars, said US planes couldn’t use the Sigonella base for combat ops without parliament signing off. Trump responded by raging at Pope Leo XIV on Truth Social for being "weak on crime"—because nothing says strategic vision like subtweeting the Bishop of Rome during a shooting war. When Meloni didn’t fall in line behind his papal tantrum, he escalated: bragging on Italian TV that she had "begged" him for a photo and that he only agreed out of pity. She, having a shred of self-respect and a looming election, fired back on video: the story was "completely fabricated" and, minor detail, Italy does not beg.
Then NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte wandered into the minefield, boasting on Fox News that some 500 US aircraft had taken off from American bases in Italy in support of "Operation Epic Fury"—the US-Israeli Iran campaign—promptly detonating Rome’s domestic politics. Italy’s defense ministry called his description "fallacious" and "totally misleading", insisting they’d only allowed technical and logistical flights, not combat missions, while Meloni’s government keeps insisting it never authorized direct military action from Italian soil. NATO then helpfully "clarified" that Rutte just meant allies had honored existing basing agreements, which is the diplomatic way of saying: everyone’s trying to pretend this isn’t exactly what it looks like.
So now Meloni is stuck between a furious electorate, a war she can’t be seen as endorsing, and a US president who treats alliances like condo board feuds: you’re either worshiping him or you’re dead to him. Ministers floated boycotting the US Embassy’s July 4th party in solidarity, then quietly backed down to the very brave position of "everyone do what you want". The next NATO summit in Ankara will put Trump and Meloni in the same room again, where the leader of the free world will presumably decide the fate of transatlantic relations based on who flatters him more: the Italian prime minister, the French frenemie Macron, or whatever cable host he watched in the motorcade on the way over. This is what happens when global security is run like a Real Housewives reunion.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
president war-crimes discovers the red scare rerun channel
Devout patriots patiently wait for the part of the sermon where the president explains why voting against him is a communist assassination plot.
Donald Trump went to the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s "Road to Majority" conference and delivered what was basically a live-action John Birch Society fanfic. Fresh off defending his war in Iran and recycling lies about election rigging, he unveiled the GOP’s new midterm message: Democrats are "godless communists" plotting to close your churches, "kill your people" and usher in the violent persecution of Christians, all because some leftwing candidates won New York primaries. Policy platform? No. Just a sermon about how the other party is an existential threat and possibly a death cult.
Never one to skip self-promotion, Trump briefly auditioned as Best Communist Ever, bragging he’d be "the greatest communist in history" because he could hand out free rent, houses and food before the country collapses and "everyone will suffer or die." Then he calmly asserted that assassinations are a "very important element" of his opponents’ ideology and called them "animals"—a totally normal thing for a sitting president to say about domestic political rivals in a country that keeps having assassination attempts.
Republican strategists, watching Trump trail in the polls after breaking his promises on prices and foreign wars, have decided the solution isn’t "govern better" but "scream Marxist" at anyone to the left of Joe Manchin. House Speaker Mike Johnson chimed in, warning that "mini-Mamdanis" are popping up everywhere and that the "insurgent left" is "openly running as Marxists, communists"—because nothing says serious governance like turning a Muslim socialist mayor into the new Goldstein for the Christian right. Reagan at least pretended the communist menace was overseas; Trump and Johnson have cut out the middleman and labeled half the country an internal enemy.
So the official midterms message from the party in power is: ignore the war, ignore the prices, ignore the broken promises. Focus instead on the apocalyptic fantasy that your atheist, trans-loving, mosque-adjacent neighbors are about to burn your church and assassinate you in the name of Marx. American democracy isn’t just being undermined by bad policy; it’s being slowly dissolved in a vat of weaponized paranoia and Cold War cosplay.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump discovers the easiest way to cut healthcare costs is to kick 5 million people off insurance
Healthcare.gov helpfully displaying plans that now cost more than your mortgage, courtesy of the Trump–GOP ‘affordability’ strategy.
Republicans have finally found a way to make the Affordable Care Act less popular: remove the “affordable” part. After President Trump and the GOP in Congress refused to extend enhanced ACA subsidies, premiums did what everyone except the administration’s pet think tanks predicted — they exploded. Double and even triple-digit increases from 2025 to 2026 have pushed 5 million people off marketplace coverage, because it turns out Americans can’t pay a second rent every month just to see a doctor.
The Trump administration is trying to spin this as a heroic crusade against "fraud," borrowing talking points from the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative outfit apparently convinced that millions of people spontaneously committed identity theft just to get a checkup. Actual health policy experts point out the obvious: when Congress spent billions on enhanced tax credits during the pandemic, enrollment doubled because people could finally afford coverage. Then Republicans let those credits expire, Democrats shut down the government trying to save them, and now 5 million fewer people have insurance — which the White House is treating as a victory, presumably for the freedom to go bankrupt from a broken arm.
The result: ACA enrollment is down 13% in a single year, from 24.2 million to 19.2 million, and the administration is patting itself on the back for "cleaning up" the rolls. It’s a neat trick — engineer a price spike, shove millions off coverage, and then blame imaginary fraudsters instead of your own policies. The marketplace isn’t collapsing, it’s being methodically sabotaged by people who think health care is a luxury and suffering is a moral teacher, as long as it happens to someone else.
#healthcare#killing-democracy#full-stupid
john bolton discovers laws actually apply to some republicans
John Bolton, seen here regretting that he didn’t just store the classified files in a ballroom and run for president.
John Bolton, Trump’s mustachioed war-enthusiast-turned-critic, just pleaded guilty to illegally hoarding classified information so he could juice his book notes. The former national security adviser admitted to a single felony count of illegal retention of national defense information after originally facing 18 counts. He’ll pay $2.25 million, do 100 hours of community service, and debrief officials on what he stashed — a sort of "tell us what secrets you stole" exit interview.
Trump, whose own classified-documents case conveniently evaporated after he was re-elected, rushed to Truth Social to demand Bolton be "dealt with harshly", proving once again that in Trump’s universe the true crime is not mishandling secrets, but doing it without remaining loyal. Bolton’s lawyer tried to spin this as what "real leaders" do — take responsibility — while explicitly contrasting that with Trump, who allegedly carted off classified files to Mar-a-Lago, fought investigators, and accepted accountability with all the enthusiasm of a cat accepting a bath.
Prosecutors stressed that Bolton knew exactly how dangerous this was, which is a polite way of saying: he’d spent decades inside the system that now has him by the mustache. Meanwhile, his indictment came alongside other cases against Trump critics like James Comey and Letitia James, but legal experts insist Bolton’s case was more straightforward. So yes, a high-ranking national security official finally faces real consequences for mishandling secrets — just not the one currently posting about "harsh" justice from the Oval Office.
#lawlessness#corruption
trump deletes climate.gov, scientists speedrun a new planet-saving website
A NOAA employee contemplates hurricane models, unaware that the real storm is the president deleting his website and calling it ‘efficiency.’
The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE, because of course it is — shut down NOAA’s hugely popular Climate.gov site, then slapped up a notice citing Executive Order 14303 and told everyone the data would still exist somewhere on NOAA.gov if you just believe hard enough and enjoy clicking through 47 dead-end links. It’s like they renovated the climate store and then moved the entrance into a broom closet.
So now a bunch of former NOAA employees, laid off by Trump’s efficiency cosplay, have had to crowdfund about $280,000 and beg volunteers to re-create their own former government site as Climate.us, just so farmers, teachers, and researchers can find basic climate data without spelunking through a federal labyrinth. Nearly a million people a month used Climate.gov, which apparently triggered the administration’s core doctrine: if science makes you look bad, bury it under an executive order and call it streamlining.
The data is technically “public,” the way a safe at the bottom of the ocean is technically “accessible.” Ex-staffers like Rebecca Lindsey are now running what amounts to a parallel shadow NOAA, complete with an 80-scientist panel, because the actual government decided that helping people understand climate risk was less important than appeasing a fossil-fuel donor’s feelings. Trump gets to claim he didn’t delete the science — he just made it unusable — while the adults pass the digital hat to rebuild the public’s front door to reality.
#anti-science#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump doj bravely defends america from… a rainbow logo
Pride Night at Oracle Park, moments before the Department of Justice deployed to liberate oppressed millionaires from colorful stitching.
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, having apparently solved all crime, has moved on to its true constitutional mission: protecting three San Francisco Giants pitchers from the unspeakable tyranny of… optional Pride Night caps. The players weren’t fined, weren’t disciplined, and weren’t even required to wear the rainbow logo, but Trump’s DOJ still opened an investigation into whether their religious rights were violated, because nothing says “limited government” like deploying federal power to litigate embroidery.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is busy turning the Pentagon into a live-action Fox News segment, blocking promotions of decorated minority and non-male officers while selling his “war on diversity” as a crusade to restore unchallenged white Christian leadership. This is the same crew that tried to quietly erase Jackie Robinson’s military service, then called it a “mistake” when caught. They’re not even subtle; they’re just hoping you’re too exhausted to notice.
Caught in the crossfire is the Giants franchise, once a civic leader on HIV/Aids and LGBTQ+ issues, now reduced to a 93-year-old right-wing mega-donor owner and Buster Posey hiding behind “baseball questions” while his own city demands answers. The team that once mirrored San Francisco’s values now mirrors Trump’s grievance politics: players cosplaying persecution, executives terrified of offending the base, and a federal government using the full weight of the state to make sure white Christian guys are never, ever inconvenienced by a rainbow cap. Authoritarianism, but make it merch.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump turns the reflecting pool into a crime scene and a vanity mirror
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, now featuring algae, razor marks, and one very fragile ego.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got the full MAGA home-renovation treatment: drained, repainted deep blue, lined with fancy polyurea, all at Trump's request so the 250th anniversary of the US could have a more on-brand backdrop for his reflection. Then came the algae bloom, peeling paint, and now, according to the National Park Service, someone apparently took a razor to the liner like it was the Constitution in a White House legal meeting.
Trump, never one to waste a crisis he possibly helped create, loudly blamed mysterious "vandals" for a "300-foot-long gash" and even suggested someone dumped fertilizer in the water, promising proof would emerge in court. The actual court filing? It confirms cuts to the foam sealant and liner and notes that about 70 fence post tops were tossed into the pool, but somehow fails to identify a culprit or even when it happened. What it does do is show up in a lawsuit from a nonprofit trying to stop Trump's little nationalist stage-design project.
So we now have a historic national monument functioning as a legal exhibit, a presidential ego pool, and a recurring construction project—all because a man who treats the federal government like a failing Atlantic City casino thought the Reflecting Pool needed to look more like a Fox News backdrop. The NPS will drain it again after July 4th to assess and repair the damage, presumably right after they finish hosing off the latest layer of algae, bird crap, and presidential spin.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
supreme court to bayer: cancer victims are bad for business
Roundup on the shelf at Lowe’s, proudly labeled with everything except the part about your white blood cells quitting their job.
The Supreme Court just handed Bayer/Monsanto a legal forcefield, ruling 7-2 that because Trump’s EPA once decided glyphosate was "unlikely" to cause cancer, the company doesn’t need to warn consumers and can’t be sued in state courts for failing to do so. Thousands of current and future cancer lawsuits? Efficiently composted. The plaintiff, Missouri farmer John Durnell, had actually won $1.25 million from a jury that believed two decades of Roundup use caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The Trump administration’s contribution: backing Bayer’s petition to make sure that kind of accountability doesn’t happen again.
The MAGA-adjacent "Make America Healthy Again" crowd is now discovering that when you elect a guy who thinks regulations are a personal insult, corporations tend to win and your lymph nodes tend to lose. MAHA influencers like Vani Hari (the "Food Babe") and "Glyphosate Girl" are raging that the administration has "sold out our fertility, vitality, and health" to corporate interests — a realization that might have been handy before Trump’s EPA rushed out a 2020 finding that glyphosate probably doesn’t give you cancer, despite the WHO’s cancer agency and a stack of studies suggesting otherwise. That Trump-era determination is now the Supreme Court’s favorite exhibit.
Not content with just helping Bayer in court, Trump also signed an executive order using the Defense Production Act to boost glyphosate supply, because of course the wartime emergency now is "not enough weed killer." Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who used to sue Monsanto over Roundup — is now helpfully backing that move while also calling pesticides "toxic by design" and saying he thinks glyphosate causes cancer. Regulatory policy in this administration is basically a riddle wrapped in a lawsuit inside a stock portfolio.
Meanwhile, MAHA moms are realizing their big anti-toxins crusade hitched itself to a White House that rolled back mercury rules, rescinded PFAS drinking water limits, expanded access to candy-flavored vapes, and sided with Bayer at the Supreme Court. The movement is "less motivated" to vote now, which is what happens when you discover your supposed health champions are busy treating corporate risk assessments as more sacred than your bone marrow. Make America Healthy Again has officially met Make Agrochemical Profits Great Again, and spoiler: only one of them has a federal agency and a Supreme Court supermajority on its side.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy#national-security
trump’s magic economy: five years of ‘temporary’ inflation
Trump’s ‘best economy ever’ seen here, as the Fed watches prices climb and pretends this is all part of the plan.
The Trump White House spent years bragging that the economy was "the greatest in history" while prices quietly did their best impression of SpaceX. Now the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge is up 4.1% year-over-year – a three-year high – powered by gas that shot up to nearly $4.50 a gallon after Trump’s little brush-with-war and then peace deal with Iran. Sure, prices have drifted back down to a still-awful $3.92, but nothing says "strong leadership" like turning every fill-up into a trust exercise with your credit card limit.
New Fed chair Kevin Warsh is doing his best "stern dad" routine, talking tough about getting inflation back to 2% while not actually saying what he’s going to do, as markets scream and tech stocks get body-slammed by rate-hike speculation. The central bank has already shelved the rate cuts it promised back in January, because when inflation has been above target for more than five years, even Wall Street starts to notice the house is on fire.
Meanwhile, the data says incomes and consumer spending are both up 0.3% after inflation, which the administration will absolutely spin as proof that everyone is thriving in Trump’s golden age. Out in the real world, households that went a decade without seeing inflation above 2.5% are now stuck in a never-ending price surge being sold as a "temporary" blip. The official line is that Americans are doing great; the PCE index, gas pumps, and grocery receipts would like to file a strongly worded rebuttal.
#killing-democracy#money#full-stupid
trump tries to nationalize mail voting, meets this thing called the constitution
Trump staring at a copy of the Constitution like it’s a defective product that keeps getting between him and other people’s ballots.
Trump’s latest brainstorm for safeguarding democracy — by strangling it — just got smacked down in federal court. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked key parts of his executive order that tried to create federal voter lists and told the Postal Service to only deliver mail ballots to people on those lists. Turns out the Constitution still says states run elections, not whichever president is currently screaming the loudest about imaginary fraud.
This is Trump’s second election overreach in as many days to get tossed in the legal shredder. Another Boston judge just permanently barred his earlier order requiring proof of citizenship to register — a policy that solves no real problem but does a great job of blocking actual citizens from voting. Despite having an administration stacked with veterans of the failed 2020 coup attempt, like Kurt Olsen and Heather Honey, they still can’t produce evidence of the “widespread fraud” they swear is everywhere except in a courtroom.
Rather than, say, help people afford housing, Trump is holding bipartisan legislation hostage until Congress passes his SAVE America Act — a voter suppression wish list dressed up as “election integrity.” He’s floated nationalizing elections, demanded access to states’ voter rolls, and launched investigations into past elections, all while his own DOJ keeps failing to prove anything beyond his obsession with staying in power. The judiciary, for now, is doing the bare minimum: reminding the would-be election czar that the presidency does not come with a free "rewrite the Constitution" button.
So yes, the Trump administration is still hellbent on redesigning American elections around his grievances. The only thing saving the system at the moment is that courts keep reading the law, while Trump and his friends keep reading Truth Social.
#killing-democracy#fascism
