Secret Service agents stand guard at Mar-a-Lago, the only presidential residence where you can dodge bullets, ethics rules, and a dress code all in the same afternoon.
An armed man carrying what appeared to be a shotgun and a fuel can was shot and killed after breaching the secure perimeter of Mar-a-Lago, the presidential timeshare slash private cash machine in Palm Beach. Secret Service agents and a Palm Beach county sheriff’s deputy opened fire near the north gate, according to the agency.
Trump, the star attraction of this security nightmare theme park, was at the White House at the time, meaning once again the only people truly in danger at Mar-a-Lago were the taxpayers footing the bill for militarized protection of a golf resort that also sells wedding packages. The man’s identity hasn’t been released yet, but the larger plot is familiar: the United States continues to underwrite a fortified luxury compound where the line between "official residence" and "pay-to-play members-only club" is about as secure as the perimeter apparently was.
So the public gets the cost, the danger, and the constitutional headaches, while Mar-a-Lago gets the prestige of being both a soft target and a soft coup against the idea that public office shouldn’t double as a hospitality brand. Truly, a five-star review for the ongoing experiment in government-by-country-club.
Global order, as curated by Donald Trump: a world map broken into puzzle pieces and then kicked under the couch.
The postwar order where the US pretended to care about rules while mostly benefiting from them has been officially upgraded to America Is Mad Now mode. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney shows up at Davos and basically tells the global elite, "Yeah, the US-led system is dead, Washington killed it, please clap." He points out that great powers – read: Trump’s White House cosplay of a protection racket – now use tariffs, finance, and supply chains as weapons, and the old story about mutual benefit is just that: a story.
European leaders, suddenly realizing the arsonist is also the former fire chief, are scrambling. Germany’s Friedrich Merz warns that the rules-based international order is being "destroyed" and that America’s leadership is "perhaps already lost", which is a polite diplomatic way of saying: the guy with the nuclear codes thinks NATO is a gym membership he can cancel. Macron, Starmer and friends are now talking about building up "hard power" and preparing to fight, because nothing says "trusted ally" like having to rearm in case your security guarantor has a tantrum.
The fantasy fix is a "third path": a new liberal, multilateral order that somehow stands up to both Trump’s America and China. Experts like Jorge Castañeda politely label this as "not viable", which translates to: nobody has the money, cohesion, or courage to decouple from Washington’s whims. Instead, the world is drifting into a chaotic marketplace of ad-hoc deals, flimsy coalitions, and hedging strategies – a kind of diplomatic gig economy where everyone’s main foreign policy objective is surviving the next American mood swing. Looming over it all: the prospect of a US that’s not just unreliable, but openly aggressive, weaponizing every tool it built after 1945 and then smashing the toolbox for good measure.
So the grand legacy of Trump’s foreign policy appears to be this: after decades of imperfect but functional global governance, the planet now gets a vibes-based security architecture held together with press conferences, side deals, and the hope that the world’s loudest reality TV star doesn’t wake up tomorrow and decide Article 5 is "for losers".
Trump, fresh off promising to stay out of the Netflix–Warner Bros deal, explaining how he’ll totally stay out of it unless they fire the Democrat he’s mad at this week.
The President of the United States has now moved on from demanding loyalty oaths from cabinet officials to demanding them from Netflix. Donald Trump jumped onto Truth Social to order the company to dump former Obama national security adviser and current board member Susan Rice or "face the consequences" — a charming phrase when it comes from the man whose Justice Department and regulators are actively involved in approving Netflix's attempted takeover of Warner Bros Discovery.
Having literally promised a few weeks ago to stay out of the Netflix–Paramount Skydance fight over WBD, Trump has of course done the opposite, using his platform to blast Rice as a "political hack" with "no talent or skills" while amplifying Laura Loomer calling Netflix and Rice "anti-American" for the crime of saying that companies who enable Trumpism might one day be held accountable. So the president is now threatening a private corporation’s governance decisions in the middle of a massive merger review because he doesn’t like a Democrat on the board. Regulatory independence? Antitrust integrity? Adorable concepts from a bygone republic.
While Larry Ellison waves around a $40bn personal guarantee like a Bond villain with a cloud-computing hobby, Trump is busy turning federal approval of a $108bn media deal into his own loyalty test. If Netflix keeps Rice, it risks "consequences" from the same government that decides whether it gets to own Warner Bros, HBO, and about half the streaming market. If it caves, it proves that corporate America understands the new rules: cross Dear Leader and your business model gets it. Who needs authoritarian state TV when you can just threaten the platforms until they staff their boards to your liking?
Abby Tighe, former CDC staffer, current member of the underground railroad for facts.
The Trump administration has discovered an innovative new public-health strategy: fire more than 4,000 CDC employees, gut a third of the agency, and then act surprised when disease, addiction, and lead poisoning don’t politely go away. Abby Tighe and hundreds of other staffers got Valentine’s Day breakup emails from the government, because nothing says we value your expertise like a form letter telling you you’re fired by an administration that thinks Robert F Kennedy is a health secretary and not a Facebook comments section in human form.
Instead of quietly disappearing, the fired staff built a mutual aid network called "Fired But Fighting" and then rebranded into the far more Capitol-friendly National Public Health Coalition, after Jerome Adams — yes, Trump’s first-term surgeon general turned public-health conscience — gently explained that Republicans get hives when they see the word "fighting" unless it’s followed by "drag queen story hour." Now these ex-CDC pros are running a "CDC Data Project" to track the administration’s budget cuts, lobbying Congress with actual evidence, and tipping off reporters when, say, Milwaukee discovers its entire childhood lead prevention program has been deleted like an inconvenient tweet. Only after public embarrassment did the administration scramble to reinstall the team, proving that the only contagion they care about controlling is bad headlines.
What’s emerging is a "shadow CDC" made up of fired civil servants, medical associations, and academic institutions trying to do the job the real CDC used to do before it was converted into a vibes-based wellness ministry. While Trump and RFK Jr treat public health like a culture-war prop, the people who used to protect Americans from outbreaks, addiction, and environmental hazards are now doing it from the outside, unpaid and unfunded, because someone has to. We’ve reached the part of the movie where the scientists go underground to keep working while the government insists gravity is woke.
Behold: the House of Representatives, where the real contest isn’t elections, it’s who can draw the most creatively rigged squiggles on a map.
American democracy update: fewer than 5% of Americans now get anything resembling a real say in who controls the House, because President Trump decided the normal once-a-decade gerrymander just wasn’t quite undemocratic enough. So he leaned on Texas to redraw its map mid-decade for five extra GOP-friendly seats, California Democrats replied with their own ballot-measure power grab for five new Dem-favored seats, and suddenly 32 states don’t have a single competitive House race. Bipartisanship lives—both parties can agree voters are a nuisance.
Instead of elections, we now have a national cartography contest where politicians use precision software to carve the country into safe little fiefdoms, then call it representation. Experts say just 18 of 435 House races are true toss-ups, and even if you generously add the “lean” races, fewer than 10% of seats are actually in play. The rest will be decided in low-turnout primaries dominated by the most extreme partisans, producing what one analyst calls the least accountable Congress of our lifetimes. So no, your vote in November probably doesn’t matter much—but Trump’s mid-decade map-tweaking sure did.
Trump, wearing the world’s loudest hat, explains he’s never heard of Project 2025 while accidentally implementing chapter 7 on live TV.
Trump swore he had no idea what Project 2025 was, which is interesting given that his second term now reads like the audiobook version. The 900‑page Heritage Foundation fantasy novel about expanding presidential power, purging the federal workforce, and shoving an ultra‑conservative social order down everyone’s throats has apparently become the operations manual on his Resolute Desk.
While Trump pretends this is all just vibes and instinct, outside trackers say the White House has already implemented over half of the Project 2025 agenda: halting billions in foreign aid, trying to erase federal DEI programs, turbo‑charging immigration enforcement, and defunding NPR and PBS for the crime of occasionally telling the truth. Meanwhile, the hilariously named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been unleashed to fire thousands of civil servants and drag independent agencies under tighter political control. Nothing screams "limited government" like a centrally planned purge of anyone who might say "no".
Heritage now insists that "all decisions are up to President Trump"—which is a cute way of saying "we just wrote the authoritarian cookbook, we can’t help it if the chef followed the recipe." The White House, for its part, responds with a word salad about making America "the hottest country in the world" by securing the border and cutting taxes, as if mass firings, institutional capture, and dismantling public broadcasting are just quirky side effects. Project 2025 was sold as a theoretical wish list; it’s now a status report on how far the administration has gotten in turning the federal government into a loyalty cult.
Memorial Circle, currently a solemn historic vista, shown here before the proposed addition of a 250-foot presidential ego obelisk in arch form.
Vietnam veterans and a retired architectural historian have gone to federal court to stop Donald Trump from plopping a 250-foot "Independence Arch" directly into one of the most sacred sightlines in the capital: the view from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington House, designed after the Civil War to symbolize national unity. The lawsuit, filed in D.C. federal court and led by Public Citizen, politely translates to: no, you may not build a campaign billboard over our dead. The plaintiffs call it a "vanity project" that would desecrate a solemn vista they regularly visit and, as a bonus, potentially create an aviation hazard for planes using Reagan National. Nothing says "thank you for your service" like turning your cemetery into an obstacle course.
The suit names Trump, senior White House officials, and the National Park Service, accusing them of steamrolling multiple federal laws: the Commemorative Works Act (you’re supposed to get Congress’ approval before erecting mega-monuments on federal land), the National Environmental Policy Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. Translation: you can’t just wake up, point at Memorial Circle, and say "build my arch there" because you saw something cool in Paris once. Meanwhile, the White House is out here insisting this will "enhance the visitor experience" and "give the greatest Nation on earth America the glory it deserves"—which is a very long way of saying Trump wants a giant patriotic selfie frame next to Arlington National Cemetery.
No one at the White House or NPS bothered to respond to NPR, presumably because they were busy measuring how tall a monument has to be for Trump to see it from his motorcade. This legal fight also comes on the heels of another lawsuit over Trump’s plan to replace the White House East Wing with a privately funded ballroom, because apparently every historic site in Washington now has to audition as a backdrop for his next fundraiser. The 250th anniversary of American independence was supposed to be about democracy and shared sacrifice; under Trump, it’s turning into a multi-year experiment in how far one man’s ego can stretch federal law, historic preservation rules, and basic decency before something finally snaps.
The CIA, seen here carefully separating intelligence analysis from politics by handing the red pen to Devin Nunes and Reince Priebus.
The CIA has announced it will retract or heavily edit 19 intelligence reports after a review by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board — a body now stacked with Trump loyalists like Devin Nunes, Reince Priebus, Brad Wenstrup, and Katie Miller (yes, the Stephen Miller one). CIA Director and Trump appointee John Ratcliffe swears this is all about protecting the agency from bias, which is a bold claim from a crew that treats objective reality like a hostile foreign power.
The offending reports? Analyses on white supremacist women being radicalized, global contraceptive shortages harming economic development, and LGBT activists under pressure in the Middle East and North Africa. So the Trump-era standard for "tradecraft" appears to be: if it makes right-wing culture warriors uncomfortable, it clearly fails the analytic rigor test. The agency insists this purge is just about meeting "the President’s expectations" that the workforce remain independent of any agenda — by obeying his agenda.
Sen. Mark Warner politely called this what it is: politicization of intelligence. Sen. Tom Cotton, meanwhile, applauded the move, accusing Obama and Biden of mixing politics and intelligence, while cheering on a board of hyperpartisan Trump picks literally rewriting the historical record. The intelligence community is supposedly being rescued from bias by the same people who think climate change is a hoax and that the deep state lives under their bed. What could possibly go wrong when national security analysis is run through a MAGA vibes-check?
The Potomac River, bravely attempting to dilute both raw sewage and four weeks of federal negligence.
The Potomac River is now hosting one of the largest sewage spills in US history, and somehow that’s still only the second-most toxic thing in Washington. After millions of gallons of raw sewage poured into the river from a ruptured 72-inch pipe that the federal government is responsible for, Trump finally approved an emergency declaration — four weeks and a lot of E. coli later.
Fema’s now allowed to show up and do the thing the administration could have greenlit a month ago, while Trump jumps on Truth Social to demand that DC mayor Muriel Bowser and Democratic governors Wes Moore and Abigail Spanberger “must act, IMMEDIATELY.” The minor complication: as Maryland officials helpfully pointed out, the broken pipe is owned and operated by DC Water but regulated by the US EPA and located on National Park Service land. So yes, the same federal government Trump runs, the one that “can fix” the issue, has been sitting on its hands while the nation’s capital marinates in a historic poop tsunami.
Local officials declared emergencies, issued health warnings, and begged for action as E. coli levels spiked and people were told not to touch the river. The Trump White House response was to blame everyone else, deny responsibility, then finally sign the paperwork and call it an “ecological disaster” like he just discovered the concept of infrastructure. America’s 250th birthday celebration is on track to feature fireworks, parades, and a river that’s basically a national monument to neglected public works. Truly, a fitting tribute to this administration’s governing philosophy.
Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, bravely charging into Los Angeles to protect the most oppressed group in a 73% Latino district: white students who might have to share the concept of smaller class sizes.
The Trump Department of Justice, now helmed by Pam Bondi, has decided that the true civil rights crisis in Los Angeles isn’t the massive achievement gap for Black and Latino students, but the “new minority”: white kids in a district where they make up about 10% of enrollment. So the DOJ is trying to jump into a lawsuit filed by the 1776 Project Foundation — because of course it’s called that — which claims LA’s decades-old desegregation remedies are actually a sinister plot of "overt discrimination" against white students.
For nearly 50 years, LAUSD has used a designation called PHBAO — predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian or other non-white — to target smaller class sizes and extra support to schools that are over 70% nonwhite, in response to actual court-ordered desegregation. The result: over 600 schools qualify, about 100 don’t. The Trump DOJ took one look at a system designed to mitigate segregation and said: this must end immediately to protect the constitutional right of white students to have the same crowded classrooms as everyone else. Bondi’s civil rights division solemnly intones that students should “never be classified or treated differently because of their race,” having apparently skipped the part of history where segregation and systemic underfunding did exactly that.
Meanwhile, data show that students of color in LAUSD still lag far behind white students in test results, which you might think suggests that maybe, just maybe, extra support in majority-nonwhite schools is still necessary. But conservative groups, fresh off the Supreme Court’s demolition of affirmative action, are on a nationwide tear to dismantle any program that even sounds like it might help Black or brown kids. When LA tried a Black Student Achievement plan that actually showed positive results — better attendance, more AP enrollment, more engagement — the same crowd screamed "reverse racism" until the district watered it down. As UCLA’s Tyrone Howard put it, the message is clear: failing Black students are fine; helping them is unconstitutional.
So here we are: the Trump administration’s Justice Department has turned "civil rights enforcement" into a weapon to attack desegregation remedies in a majority-minority district, all while pretending they’ve just discovered colorblindness in 2026. When the federal government’s big stand for equality is making sure white kids in Los Angeles don’t accidentally sit in a class with fewer than 34.5 students, you’re not protecting the constitution — you’re using it as a prop in the culture war.
Nothing to see here, just the U.S. military beta-testing "reactor on a plane" so Trump’s friends can plug their AI server farms straight into a flying Chernobyl carry-on.
The Pentagon just did a test run of "DoorDash, but make it nuclear," airlifting a privately built Valar Atomics microreactor from California to Utah on a C-17 so the Trump administration can brag that it can drop reactors wherever it wants, whenever it wants. Don’t worry though, they promise this one didn’t have fuel in it, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes you feel safe when the same crew that can’t run a basic background check is now playing Lego with fission.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Defense Undersecretary Michael Duffey flew along with the 5‑megawatt unit to celebrate what they’re calling a "breakthrough" in fast-tracking commercial licensing for microreactors. Translation: we found a way to use the military as a flying demo showroom for private nuclear vendors while shoving regulators to the back of the cargo bay. All of this is wrapped in Trump’s grand plan to "reshape" the energy landscape by loving nuclear, hating renewables, and still worshipping coal like it’s 1892.
The sales pitch is that these pop-up reactors will power both the military and the exploding demand from AI and data centers — you know, the same AI industry that already writes half the administration’s talking points. Skeptics keep pointing out pesky issues like safety, cost, and feasibility, but the White House seems far more interested in proving it can strap a reactor to a plane than in demonstrating how you secure, regulate, or decommission a fleet of flying nukes-for-hire. What could possibly go wrong when you fuse wartime logistics, deregulation, and corporate tech thirst into one glowing little box?
Anderson Cooper walks away from 60 Minutes while CBS executives measure how far they can bend before Trump and Larry Ellison tell them to snap.
Anderson Cooper bails on 60 Minutes, Stephen Colbert has to smuggle a basic political interview onto YouTube like it’s banned literature, and CBS Evening News helpfully rewrites its own ICE reporting to make immigrants look scarier. No, that’s not a dystopian screenplay; that’s just what happens when your parent company, Paramount Skydance, wants to buy Warner Bros Discovery and needs Donald Trump’s government to pat it on the head and sign off.
David Ellison runs Paramount Skydance, Larry Ellison signs the checks, and Trump’s pet FCC chair Brendan Carr stands by, ready to bless the deal if CBS proves it can play nice and tilt right. Bari Weiss, now reporting directly to Ellison, steers 60 Minutes into MAGA-curious waters, while a CBS producer resigns and flatly says the quiet part out loud: editorial independence is gone; everything is screened for ideological compliance. Colbert called CBS’s settlement of Trump’s frivolous lawsuit a “big, fat bribe,” and—what do you know—his contract suddenly vanished too.
This is what media scholars politely call “media capture” and what normal people might call “corporate fascism with better lighting.” The state doesn’t even need to censor anyone; Trump just growls, and billionaires like the Ellisons start pre-censoring their newsrooms to protect a multibillion-dollar merger. Journalism is supposed to serve the public, but under Trump’s America it’s being repurposed to serve yacht upgrades and presidential ego management. Democracy gets downgraded to a content vertical.
Come for the national parks, stay for the indefinite detention by a giant, screaming Donald Trump with a badge and a quota spreadsheet.
Karen Newton, a 65-year-old British grandmother with a valid US tourist visa, went to see bison and geysers and wound up getting the full Trump-era police state sampler. After Canadian border officials bounced her and her husband back over a paperwork issue with their car, US officials discovered his visa had expired and responded with the calm, proportionate measure you’d expect from an $85bn deportation machine: they handcuffed and shackled her too, then locked her in a cell and drove her 12 hours through the night to an ICE detention center.
Karen, who has no criminal record and apparently the wild, radical lifestyle of a retired primary school admin who does cross-stitch, spent six weeks in ICE custody despite having all the legal paperwork she needed to be in the country. Guards allegedly told her that ICE officers get paid per head they detain, which really clarifies why the agency is suddenly treating tourists like bounties in a dystopian loyalty program. Trump’s second-term ICE, now fattened from a $6bn budget to $85bn and showering new hires with up to $50,000 signing bonuses, has been ordered to crank daily arrests up to 1,200–1,500 — so sure, the math checks out: your valid visa is now just a cover charge for entering the for-profit detention arcade.
Karen joins a growing list of international travelers — German tourists, a British backpacker, a Canadian actor, a New Zealander and her six-year-old son — who learned the hard way that under Trump, legal entry status is mostly a suggestion and the real immigration policy is "how many warm bodies can we throw in a cell today." The message from America’s tourism board has never been clearer: visit the US, see the sights, try the cuisine, maybe get disappeared into an $85bn immigration gulag because someone needs to hit their quota.
Todd Blanche hits “send tweet” to fire a court-appointed U.S. attorney, proving once again that under Trump, constitutional law is just content for the feed.
The Eastern District of Virginia got about three hours of lawful leadership before the Trump DOJ kicked it to the curb. Federal judges unanimously appointed veteran litigator James Hundley as interim U.S. attorney — a guy with 30+ years of experience, complex criminal and civil work, and an actual argument before the Supreme Court under his belt. Chief Judge M. Hannah Lauck swore him in, paperwork filed, oath taken, the whole quaint "rule of law" ritual.
Then Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche hopped onto X like a reality show contestant with a badge and declared, "Here we go again. EDVA judges do not pick our US Attorney. POTUS does. James Hundley, you’re fired!" Federal law explicitly lets judges appoint a U.S. attorney when the president’s nominee hasn’t been confirmed within 120 days — but the Trump administration has apparently moved on to a new constitutional theory: the statute doesn’t count if it inconveniences Dear Leader’s patronage network.
This is now a pattern, not a glitch. Hundley was stepping in after a judge ruled that Trump stan Lindsey Halligan — an insurance lawyer with zero prosecutorial experience whose main qualification was hating Letitia James and James Comey — was serving unlawfully. Same story in New Jersey, where Pam Bondi axed judge-appointed Desiree Leigh Grace to protect Trump ally Alina Habba’s turf, and in the Northern District of New York, where Donald Kinsella got an email from the White House informing him the president had personally ordered his removal. Federal judges follow the law, replace illegally installed loyalists, and the Trump team responds by yanking the replacements and reasserting political control over prosecutions.
So yes, the Department of Justice is now openly treating judicial appointments authorized by statute as optional suggestions, while blasting out "you’re fired" posts on social media like it’s 2017 and the Constitution is just a Terms of Service pop-up. The message to the bench is clear: you can rule our cronies are unlawful all you want — we’ll just keep firing anyone who isn’t a Trump foot soldier until the only qualification for U.S. attorney is "willing to prosecute the president’s enemies on command." Independent justice has officially been replaced with at-will employment, Mar-a-Lago edition.
DHS agents managing traffic, public safety, and the occasional undisclosed fatal shooting, all without the burden of telling the public what actually happened.
The Department of Homeland Security apparently decided that killing a 23-year-old US citizen during Trump’s second-term immigration purge was just a minor paperwork issue, not something the public needed to know about. Newly released, heavily blacked-out ICE documents show that Ruben Ray Martinez was shot and killed by a Homeland Security Investigations agent on South Padre Island in March 2025 during a traffic encounter that DHS somehow forgot to publicly disclose for 11 months. Local outlets reported a shooting at the time, but nobody mentioned that federal immigration agents were involved, because transparency is for governments that aren’t running a nationwide crackdown.
According to DHS, Martinez “intentionally ran over” an HSI agent, prompting another agent to fire “defensive shots” through the driver’s window. According to Martinez’s mother – and, awkwardly, a Texas Rangers investigator – there’s video that contradicts the federal agents’ story. That state investigation was reportedly finished in October and supposed to go to a grand jury, yet DPS now says the case is still “active”, which is bureaucrat for “we’re all waiting to see how much political heat this causes”. Meanwhile, the agents’ names are redacted, the only person who definitely died is a US citizen who went to the beach for his birthday, and the shooting is just one of at least six deadly federal encounters since Trump 2.0’s immigration dragnet kicked off. Law and order, it turns out, mostly means you don’t get to know who killed your kid or why.
US ambassador Mike Huckabee, seen here workshopping foreign policy directly from the Book of Genesis instead of, say, international law.
The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast and casually suggested it would be “fine if they took it all” — "it" being land stretching from Egypt to the Euphrates, i.e. most of the modern Middle East. Not content with normal diplomacy, Huckabee has upgraded US foreign policy to Old Testament cosplay, declaring Israel a land that God personally deeded over, with the ambassador apparently serving as the world's least subtle real estate agent for Yahweh.
Tucker, who now brands himself as a persecuted victim of routine airport security, helpfully clarified that this biblical promise covers Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and big chunks of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Huckabee quibbled only on the exact size of the fantasy empire, then doubled down that it’d be perfectly acceptable if Israel just went ahead and took the lot. So America’s official representative in Jerusalem is out here endorsing a theologically mandated regional annexation project on a podcast, while Washington pretends it’s still promoting “stability” and “rules-based order.” Imperialism by scripture citation is a bold new chapter in Trump-era diplomacy.
Artist’s rendition of DHS’s new ‘cost-saving’ deportation jet, featuring 14 beds, 4 TVs, a bar, and room for exactly zero shame.
The Department of Homeland Security has apparently decided that if you’re going to run a mass deportation machine, you might as well do it from a flying country club. DHS is eyeing a $70m Boeing 737-8 Max with a queen bed, showers, a kitchen, four big flat-screens, and a bar – officially for ICE deportation flights, but also, very coincidentally, for ferrying Trump administration VIPs to their Very Important Photo Ops in maximum comfort.
The problem? Normal ICE deportation flights move over 100 shackled detainees plus guards and medical staff. This jet maxes out at 18 passengers and sleeps 14, which is great if your mission is “flying cabinet slumber party,” less great if you’re pretending this is about operational efficiency. Even DHS officials are reportedly calling the dual-use fantasy “far-fetched,” which is bureaucrat-speak for “this is obviously a grift.”
A DHS spokesperson gamely insists they’re converting at least one bedroom into seating to meet the “deportation mission set” and that the plane is 40% cheaper than using military aircraft, which is a bold claim given that it currently has a bar. This airborne Ritz-Carlton is also being sold as part of secretary Kristi Noem’s crusade to “save taxpayer dollars,” a fascinating rebrand for the same Kristi Noem who was just censured by House Democrats for blowing $200m on a pair of Gulfstream jets for herself and her deputy during a government shutdown.
So yes, the administration is tightening its belt on waste and abuse – by consolidating deportations and luxury travel into one convenient forever-grifting package. Shackled migrants in the back, Trump officials up front with cocktails and flat-screens. Truly, a model of fiscal responsibility.
Congress briefly pretends to value art and history, pauses Trump’s culture purge for one fiscal year only.
Donald Trump tried to defund reality again, this time by going after the Smithsonian, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and museums that dare acknowledge women, Black Americans, Latinos, and Indigenous people exist. He even slapped an executive order with the extremely normal title “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” on it, accusing the Smithsonian of being corrupted by a "race-centered ideology"—because nothing says truth and sanity like demanding history be less accurate and more flattering to white grievance.
Congress, in a rare moment of wanting to look slightly less like an authoritarian book club, quietly restored funding in a January bill, keeping the IAIA and other targeted institutions alive. This didn’t happen because Republicans suddenly discovered the humanities, but because students, alumni, and advocates launched a relentless pressure campaign, writing letters, talking to the press, and explaining that maybe erasing Indigenous and minority culture from public life is bad. IAIA president Shelly C Lowe calls the funding a "relief"; the catch is that everyone now has to spend their time lobbying just to not be deleted from the federal budget every year like a line item in Trump’s ego spreadsheet.
So the Institute of American Indian Arts gets $13.5m to keep its doors open and continue proving that Indigenous art, culture, and economic impact are real. The trade-off is that they, and every other cultural institution Trump targeted, now live in a world where federal support for history and art is a recurring hostage situation. The good news: advocacy worked. The bad news: they’ll have to keep fighting, because the president still wants the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities to go the way of his attention span.
Artist’s rendering of President Donald J Trump International Airport, featuring state-sponsored branding opportunities, a runaway grift, and the occasional airplane.
Florida Republicans have decided that infrastructure is just merch with runways, ramming through a bill to rename Palm Beach International as the “President Donald J Trump International Airport” less than a week after Trump’s lawyers quietly filed to trademark the exact name. The Trump Organization swears he won’t make a dime off it, which is why they’re, checks notes, aggressively securing trademarks for airport names, luggage, shuttle buses, jetways and assorted travel swag.
Local residents and county officials who actually own and govern the airport? Irrelevant. The bill uses state pre-emption to rip naming rights away from Palm Beach County, because when Republicans say they’re for local control, they obviously mean until it interferes with free branding opportunities for the guy at Mar-a-Lago. The final bill text doesn’t even require a free license from Trump, despite his company’s PR claims; GOP senator Debbie Mayfield helpfully confirmed he’s free to cash in because stopping the president from monetizing taxpayer-funded infrastructure would apparently be a "free market violation".
All that’s left is a rubber stamp from Gov. Ron DeSantis and the FAA, currently run by Trump pal Bryan Bedford, who is expected to treat this like what it is: a paperwork formality on the way to turning a public airport into a taxpayer-subsidized Trump marketing platform. Florida didn’t fix its housing crisis or insurance collapse, but it did manage to rename a road and an airport after the sitting president who lives five miles away. Truly a golden age of public service.
Trump-era EPA officials standing proudly in front of a coal plant, explaining that the real hazard is regulatory overreach, not the visible cloud of brain-damaging neurotoxins behind them.
The Trump EPA has decided that mercury — a neurotoxin that harms babies’ brain development — is just another pesky regulation standing between America and the God-given right to run 40-year-old coal plants so AI servers can keep hallucinating cat photos. At an event in Kentucky (of course), the administration announced it will roll back Biden-era Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that were set to slash mercury pollution by 70% and toxic metals like nickel, arsenic, and lead by two-thirds. Health benefits through 2037 were estimated at $420m, but the EPA now claims the old 2012 rule is good enough and anything more is just too expensive for the poor, struggling utility companies.
This isn’t a one-off dumb idea; it’s a coordinated campaign of policy arson. Trump previously declared an “energy emergency” so he could keep decrepit coal plants open and exempt them from key air rules, then literally invited coal plants to email the government for two-year get-out-of-MATS-free cards — 68 plants happily signed up to keep spewing neurotoxins. Last week, the EPA helpfully repealed the “endangerment finding” that gave it authority to regulate greenhouse gases at all, and the White House ordered the Pentagon to buy coal power like it’s war bonds for black lung. All this to prop up an industry that now supplies less than 20% of U.S. electricity, but 100% of the administration’s nostalgia for when men were men and air was chunky.
So yes, coal plants remain among the largest sources of mercury, lead, arsenic, acid gases, benzene, formaldehyde, and dioxins — but on the bright side, some aging coal executives might squeeze out a few more quarters of profit before the planet finishes baking. The message from Trump’s EPA is clear: if you’re a fetus, a kid, or someone living downwind of a plant, your health is a rounding error in the great crusade to keep obsolete coal burners on life support for the glory of AI and campaign donors.
