trump upgrades deep state to at-will cult membership
Trump reviews a list of 50,000 civil servants and circles the ones whose only crime was reading the Constitution.
The Trump administration has decided that 4,000 political appointees just aren’t enough loyalists, so they’re reclassifying about 50,000 career civil servants into a new "Schedule Policy/Career" bucket – which is Latin for "you’re fired the second you follow the law instead of Trump". Traditionally, only political appointees could be canned on a whim; now the White House wants the power to purge huge swaths of the professional bureaucracy for the crime of not treating Truth Social posts as binding legal authority.
To really complete the autocrat starter pack, the rule also guts whistleblower protections by shifting enforcement away from the independent Office of Special Counsel and into the agencies themselves. So if you report misconduct in your department, the people you reported will helpfully decide whether you still get to have a job. The Office of Personnel Management insists that “personal or political loyalty tests” are prohibited, while simultaneously handing Trump the ability to politically purge anyone deemed insufficiently obedient. It’s like banning arson while mailing out free flamethrowers.
Unions and watchdogs are calling this what it is: a blueprint for politically motivated purges and a direct assault on a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service. AFGE warns that competent professionals will be swapped out for political flunkies, which, if history is any guide, means a lot more Jareds and Kash Patels and a lot fewer people who know how federal law works. Heritage’s Project 2025 has been drooling over this exact plan for years; now OPM director Scott Kupor is dutifully selling it as “much-needed accountability,” because nothing screams accountability like making every policy job dependent on personal loyalty to one extremely indicted man.
#killing-democracy#fascism
ice upgrades to business class ethnic cleansing
Nothing says ‘family values’ like using your donor’s Gulfstream to airlift shackled Palestinians into an occupied territory.
Why use boring old government planes for your secretive mass deportations when you can charter a Trump crony’s Gulfstream and turn human rights violations into a luxury travel experience? ICE quietly loaded at least eight shackled Palestinian men onto Florida developer and Trump mega-fan Gil Dezer’s 16-seat "little rocket ship" and flew them from near an Arizona detention center to Tel Aviv, with a scenic refueling tour of New Jersey, Ireland, and Bulgaria along the way. Hours later, Israeli authorities dumped them at a West Bank checkpoint in the cold, in prison tracksuits, holding plastic bags. Truly the platinum package of state cruelty.
Dezer isn’t just some random guy with a plane; he’s a longtime Trump business partner, donor, buddy of Donald Trump Jr, and a proud member of Friends of the IDF. So naturally, his jet just happens to be the one used for a "secretive and politically sensitive" US operation to deport Palestinians to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a policy shift immigration lawyers say is straight out of Trump’s mass-deportation fever dream. One deportee, 24-year-old Maher Awad, who grew up in the US and has a newborn son in Michigan, described being dropped "like animals" on the side of the road and begging locals for help. Family separation, occupation laundering, and a little private-jet glamour – the Trump brand really knows its niche.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
bernie sanders notices the house is on fire, suggests maybe we stop pouring gasoline
Bernie Sanders, patiently explaining that when the president is arresting opponents, terrorizing communities with a domestic shock troop, and fantasizing about annexing random countries, maybe the real problem isn’t too much civility in politics.
Bernie Sanders has taken a brief break from being the country’s disappointed grandfather to lay out the obvious: the American Dream has been repossessed, the middle class is on life support, and the billionaire class is joyriding around in what’s left of the republic. Wages are flat, housing is a luxury product, college is a debt trap, healthcare is a slot machine, and our food and transit systems are held together with corn syrup and wishful thinking.
But the economic collapse is just the appetizer. The main course is Trump’s ongoing authoritarian cosplay, which has now blown past "strongman aesthetic" and landed firmly in actual strongman behavior. Sanders spells it out: Trump is usurping Congress, menacing the courts, bullying the media and universities, and using the justice system as a personal vengeance machine. ICE, meanwhile, is described as Trump’s "domestic army" – terrorizing communities, kicking down doors without due process, detaining children, illegally deporting people, and, yes, shooting American citizens, because nothing says "law and order" like state-sanctioned chaos.
Abroad, President Big Brain feels more at home with Gulf monarchies and far-right extremists than with boring old democracies. Sanders points to Trump’s unconditional embrace of Netanyahu (currently starring in "Genocide, But Make It Policy"), illegal attacks on Venezuela, and fever-dream ideas like annexing Canada or seizing Greenland, as if Risk is now official U.S. foreign policy. The op-ed then commits the gravest sin in Washington: it suggests actually confronting oligarchs, ending Citizens United, taxing the rich, guaranteeing healthcare, building housing, and letting workers unionize – you know, the sort of agenda that might interfere with the donor class’s urgent need for a ninth yacht.
Sanders’ message is that you don’t beat creeping fascism just by tweeting "this is not normal" into the void. You organize, build a multiracial working-class movement, and pass policies that actually improve people’s lives – which, inconveniently, would make Trump-style strongman theatrics less appealing. The ruling class calls that "radical"; history calls it "the bare minimum for not sliding into oligarchic ruin."
#killing-democracy#fascism#forever-grifting
tiktok 'patriotism' successfully converted to billable hours
Stock footage of TikTok on a phone, brought to you by the bipartisan coalition of people who discovered national security threats are extremely monetizable.
Sean Cooksey, the guy who helped turn TikTok from national security emergency into "lucrative American investor opportunity," is leaving JD Vance’s office for BGR Group, a lobbying and public affairs firm. So the White House’s TikTok "fixer" is now going to get paid to work the very system he just helped reshape. That’s not a conflict of interest, that’s just called career advancement in the Trump-Vance era.
Cooksey, a former FEC chair and veteran of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley’s offices, was Vance’s legal point man on the grand project of "saving" TikTok by shoving it into a joint venture backed by U.S. investors — neatly transforming a geopolitical tech panic into a domestic profit center. Now he strolls out the door to K Street while everyone in the administration lines up to praise his heroic service to "American innovation," which apparently means designing deals that keep the app online and the donor class happy.
When he wasn’t rescuing teens’ dance videos, Cooksey was helping stand up a shiny new Justice Department Division for National Fraud Enforcement, supposedly inspired by welfare fraud investigations in Minnesota. Nothing says "we’re serious about fraud" like sending the architect of your corporate-friendly tech deals straight into the arms of a major lobbying firm. He also helped pressure the U.K. to back off demands for Apple encryption backdoors, which is admirable right up until you remember the guy now sells access for a living.
Cooksey calls this "the greatest presidential administration of my lifetime" and promises to keep supporting Trump and Vance from his new role. Of course he will. The revolving door isn’t a bug of this administration’s ethics; it’s the operating system. The TikTok panic was about security, they told us. The outcome, as usual, was about who gets paid.
#forever-grifting#corruption
trump discovers elections work better when he runs all of them
Live look at American democracy, brought to you by the guy who thinks elections are only legitimate when he wins them.
On today’s episode of “What If We Just Deleted Federalism”, Trump is reportedly pushing to “nationalize” U.S. elections — because if there’s one guy you want in charge of every ballot, it’s the man who tried to overturn the last one and then demanded to be made president again by default. Even congressional Republicans, whose job description is usually “nod along and pretend this is fine,” are backing away from this one like it’s a subpoena.
Meanwhile, over at DHS, the administration is apparently assembling what House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark bluntly calls a “rogue paramilitary force.” So that’s cool: centralized control of elections on one side, an unaccountable, politicized security apparatus on the other. Somewhere James Madison just sat bolt upright in his grave and started looking for the nearest exit.
If that’s not enough authoritarian cosplay for one news block, Democrats are also begging for “common sense” rules to make sure ICE agents “behave” — which is a polite way of saying “maybe the federal government shouldn’t run its immigration enforcement like a spite-fueled militia.” The throughline of the whole hour: Trump wants more direct control over the mechanics of democracy, fewer checks on the people with guns, and Republicans are only objecting because it might blow back on them in the midterms, not because any of this resembles a healthy republic.
So to recap: a president who tried to overturn an election now wants to run all elections, his DHS toys are being described as a rogue paramilitary, and the best Congress can muster is a mix of nervous press hits and sternly worded letters. The Founders definitely imagined this when they wrote “checks and balances,” they just forgot to add the part where one branch is too scared of mean tweets to use them.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s ice finally frees 10-year-old hostage, wants applause
ICE family detention: now with complimentary measles and mandatory fourth-grade trauma.
America’s toughest gang, ICE, has graciously decided to stop imprisoning a 10-year-old Minnesota fourth-grader after a month in detention. Elizabeth Zuna Caisaguano and her mother — who have a perfectly legal, active asylum case — were scooped up by federal agents on 6 January and shipped from Minnesota to Dilley, Texas, because nothing says “land of the free” like disappearing elementary school kids across state lines.
The Dilley family facility, helpfully, is also the site of a measles outbreak, turning Trump’s immigration policy into a combo package of family separation and public health hazard. A federal judge, Fred Biery, finally had to step in and block their removal or transfer, noting that “this didn’t have to happen” and that the family did everything they were supposed to do before being detained and separated anyway. So yes, the system is working exactly as designed.
Meanwhile, Tom Homan — Trump’s favorite border hardliner — announced that about 700 federal agents will leave Minnesota, leaving a mere 2,000 still on the ground, which is wildly above normal levels for the state. So the occupation-lite continues: schools terrorized, kids vanish into detention, and the administration acts like it’s just routine paperwork. The headline is that a 10-year-old got out; the real story is that hundreds of other kids are still inside, and the government needed a federal judge to remind them that child imprisonment during an asylum process is not actually a constitutional hobby.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
trump swaps one deportation ghoul for another, calls it 'de-escalation'
Tom Homan explains that flooding Minnesota with 2,000 federal agents is actually de-escalation if you squint hard enough and ignore the bodies.
Tom Homan, the guy who helped design family separation and once promised to run "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen," has been flown into Minnesota as Trump's "border czar" to calm tensions after two US citizens were killed during immigration raids. His big peace offering? Pulling back 700 agents while proudly noting that 2,000 federal immigration officers are still flooding the state, compared with the usual 150. Nothing says "de-escalation" like leaving a small occupying army in place and refusing to say the victims' names.
Gregory Bovino, the previous crisis arsonist in charge, made a name for himself with parking-lot ambushes, home raids and echoing Kristi Noem's baseless claim that Alex Pretti was armed. Now he's been replaced by Homan, who is slightly better at talking to cameras but fully committed to the same program: "If you're in the country illegally, if we find you, we will deport you." Meanwhile, people with legal status and no criminal record keep getting scooped up, protesters and observers get roughed up, and DHS pretends it's all about "public safety threats."
The new strategy is classic Trump-era strongman: squeeze local jails into quietly collaborating so ICE can vacuum people up at release, then brag that "more agents in the jail means fewer agents in the street"—as if moving the civil rights violations indoors makes them gentler. Minnesota law bans holding people past release on ICE detainers, so Homan swears nobody’s being kept "one minute" extra, while refusing to say which sheriffs have cut backroom deals. Experts point out the obvious: the mission hasn't changed at all, just the PR packaging, and if Minnesota caves now, the administration can always come back later with more raids and more demands.
So Minneapolis gets a polished architect of family separation instead of a loudmouthed raid enthusiast, thousands of federal agents still roaming the state, and an administration openly using one blue state as a test lab for a national mass deportation regime. The agenda is still the same: normalize a permanent crackdown, call it law and order, and hope people stop noticing that citizens are getting killed while the "border" is now apparently in downtown Minneapolis.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
trump takes a chainsaw to the arts, accidentally invents a resistance festival
Live from New York: one last performance of free expression before the Ministry of Culture turns the lights off.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in culture policy: if it looks like art, defunds like art, or might someday criticize Dear Leader, it gets the axe. Around $27m in arts grants have vanished, some 560 projects tossed into the trash, and the Kennedy Center — where Trump proudly bragged about cutting "woke programming" — is now conveniently "closed for renovations". The Smithsonian and other big institutions have been put on notice: stay safe, stay bland, and definitely don’t mention fascism unless you’re endorsing it.
Artists, being historically bad at shutting up, are responding by turning the whole country into a low-budget Weimar reboot. In LA, Unquiet: A Night of Creative Resistance features poems like Antifa Tea Party and anti-fascist improv, while the nationwide Fall of Freedom series pulled off 700+ performances, from live remediations of ICE detentions to dance protests at the very Kennedy Center Trump is trying to neuter. Playwrights are staging dystopias about ICE raids and abortion, climate dramatists are bracing for death threats because the president is busy "gutting meteorology and science", and theaters serving immigrant and Palestinian communities are building safety protocols in case ICE decides the show needs a raid.
So now just showing up to a play about climate change or state violence is a political act, and venues are quietly planning for what happens when law enforcement or federal goons decide art is terrorism. Trump gets his culture war; what he’s actually building is a shadow network of resistance theaters, poets, and performers who’ve realized that if the administration is going to treat them like enemies of the state, they might as well act like it — tickets on sale now.
#killing-democracy#fascism
america first, china winning by 20 points
Donald Trump explains his China strategy: a complex mix of tariffs, tantrums, and handing Xi Jinping a gift-wrapped AI advantage.
Trump’s second-term "strategic vision"—a phrase doing a lot of work here—amounts to handing China a fruit basket, a bouquet, and the keys to the global order. After years of ranting that Beijing wants to "challenge American power," he responded by gutting U.S. science, botching a trade war so badly that China walked away with a record $1.2 trillion surplus, and letting them sprint ahead in electric cars, wind, and batteries. America First apparently means "America first to forfeit the future."
Allies watched this clown show and did the rational thing: they called Beijing. Canada, tired of being threatened with becoming the 51st state and hammered with tariffs, signed a new strategic partnership with China. South Korea inked a dozen tech and trade deals in Beijing, the UK and Germany lined up for Xi Jinping photo ops, and world opinion polls now show more countries see China—not the U.S.—as the top economic power. Trump didn’t just weaken NATO; he created a global "find a new best friend" program, and Xi is the one handing out membership cards.
The national security pièce de résistance: reversing Biden-era curbs and greenlighting Nvidia to sell advanced AI chips to China after some billionaire donors whined about lost profits. Jake Sullivan called it "nuts" because it literally solves China’s main military-tech bottleneck. So after years of screaming about the China threat, Trump personally helps fix Beijing’s computing shortfall and then brags about being tough on China. The trade war ended with China restricting rare earths and banning U.S. soybeans until Trump folded, enraging American farmers and proving that the self-proclaimed master negotiator can, in fact, be bullied into submission—just not by his own citizens.
#national-security#killing-democracy#full-stupid
trump to nukes: 'if they explode, they explode'
Artist’s impression of Trump’s 'Golden Dome': a giant, gold-plated umbrella over Mar-a-Lago, funded by your grandkids’ tax dollars and protected by exactly zero working interceptors.
Senator Ed Markey is here with the cheery reminder that the last remaining US-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, New START, is expiring, and Donald Trump’s position is essentially: “Eh.” For the first time in over 50 years, there will be zero limits on US and Russian nuclear arsenals, but the guy with the launch codes is publicly musing that, if the treaty expires, it just "expires"—like a coupon, or a non-disclosure agreement he forgot to pay off.
Instead of backing the boring, proven method of not dying in nuclear fire (treaties, inspections, verification), Trump is drooling over a fantasy missile shield he calls "Golden Dome"—a wildly expensive sci‑fi grift that doesn’t work, but would shovel trillions to defense contractors and, naturally, required him to "control" Greenland. Because when you’re playing nuclear roulette with 4,000 warheads, why not toss in a little casual imperialism and real estate cosplay.
Markey points out the obvious: missile defense has burned through hundreds of billions and still can’t reliably stop a determined ICBM, but it’s fantastic at one thing—fueling a new arms race, since Russia and others can just build more offensive missiles to overwhelm the magic dome. With 91% of Americans supporting new limits, Trump is once again heroically standing up to the tyranny of public opinion, basic survival instincts, and math, edging us toward Arms Race 2.0 while pretending it’s some kind of strategic genius move.
#national-security#killing-democracy
robert kraft kneels … to trump
Robert Kraft presents Donald Trump with a Patriots jersey, helpfully reminding everyone which team American oligarchy really plays for.
Robert Kraft once cosplayed as the reasonable billionaire of the NFL – visiting Meek Mill in prison, nudging Devin and Jason McCourty into activism, and tut-tutting Trump after January 6 like a disappointed dad who just found the fascism stash under the bed. He even allegedly stopped talking to Trump for a while, which in oligarch terms is the equivalent of storming the Bastille.
That brief outbreak of conscience has now been resolved, thanks to the healing power of Melania: The Documentary, a $40m Amazon MGM love letter to the woman who thought cyberbullying was bad unless her husband did it on live TV. Kraft shows up at the premiere and then on stage with Trump, happily dancing through the authoritarian afterparty while the country slides into "restorative whiteness" and the NFL quietly memory-holes its own fleeting flirtation with phrases like "End Racism" in the end zones.
The league’s political energy hasn’t disappeared; it just changed jerseys. Black coaches are shut out again, the Harbaugh brothers are openly swooning for Trump, and the NFL’s military pageantry rolls on while the slogans get dialed back to the safest corporate gibberish imaginable. Kraft, once sold as a bridge between radicalized players and reactionary owners, is back where he started: standing next to a president who incited an attack on his own government and then used the Department of Justice to cut a $5m check to Ashli Babbitt’s family. The bread is more expensive, but the circuses are still free – especially if you own the tent.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
trump spends $600 million to prove he’s ‘tough on crime’ in the safest dc in 30 years
Behold, $600 million worth of background extras for Trump’s ‘crime emergency’ that DOJ stats say doesn’t exist.
The Trump administration has managed to light more than $330 million in taxpayer money on fire so far — on pace for over $600 million — to keep nearly 2,500 National Guard troops wandering around Washington, D.C., in a city the Justice Department says hit a 30-year low in crime in 2024. Trump declared a "crime emergency" anyway, because why let reality interfere with a good fearmongering photo op? Democrats on the GOP-led Senate Homeland Security Committee kindly checked whether this very expensive cosplay-police operation is doing anything and, shockingly, the Guard cannot identify a single measurable public safety benefit from their presence.
Instead, the mission goal is basically "end all violent crime and overdoses" — a totally normal, definitely not "stay forever" metric for a domestic military deployment in the nation’s capital. While actual crime has gone down over the past year, there’s no evidence the troops had anything to do with it. What they can brag about is packing 6,030 pounds of food, painting 270 feet of fence, and pruning 65 trees, which sounds less like a security operation and more like a very overfunded Boy Scout project. Meanwhile, the deployment cost is on track to exceed the entire annual D.C. police budget, but sure, tell us again how Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility.
Oversight hasn’t gone great either: the Pentagon just ignored senators’ written questions until committee staff physically showed up at D.C. National Guard HQ. A federal judge already ruled the deployment illegally intrudes on local authority, only for an appeals court to swoop in and announce that the president has a "unique power" to turn the capital into a semi-permanent military backdrop. As a bonus, two Guard members have been shot — one fatally — during this political theater. Or, as Sen. Gary Peters more politely put it, this is a "very expensive publicity stunt" that normalizes soldiers in American streets and degrades readiness. Trump calls it law and order; everyone else calls it paying hundreds of millions for a campaign ad with rifles.
#fascism#killing-democracy
good chaps, bad friends: mandelson, epstein and the untouchable lords
Lord Mandelson in 2008, moments before being granted lifetime access to the ‘no consequences for peers’ programme.
Peter Mandelson, New Labour’s original Prince of Darkness, has finally discovered the one scandal you can’t just spin away: being all over the US Department of Justice’s Epstein files while the Met investigates you for potential misconduct in public office. After decades gliding around Westminster like a Bond villain with a diary, his career has hit what polite people call a “shuddering halt” and impolite people call “wow, those flight logs aged badly.”
The best part? Even now, under investigation and forced out as UK ambassador to Washington, Mandelson still keeps the title, the seat, and the comfy red-leather forever-club of the House of Lords. As Guardian investigator Henry Dyer dryly notes, peers are supposedly governed by the “good chap” theory – a system where billionaires’ buddies are trusted to regulate themselves on the basis of personal honour. Shockingly, a chamber stuffed with lobbyists, donors and retired ministers has not turned out to be a model of ethical self-policing.
While Labour MPs mutter that Keir Starmer’s premiership might not survive appointing Epstein’s well-connected pal as US ambassador, the constitutional reality is bleakly simple: you can lose your job, your reputation and your usefulness to the party, but that lifetime seat in the Lords? That’s basically bolted to the floor. Britain’s unelected upper house continues to function as a cross between a retirement home for political fixers and a witness protection programme for reputations, running on the quaint assumption that everyone there is a good chap right up until the police show up.
#corruption#killing-democracy
trump crowns himself king, discovers first amendment is inconvenient
Nancy Pelosi politely explaining that when the president arrests journalists, you’re not in a rom-com, you’re in the prequel to a junta.
Nancy Pelosi used a Washington Press Club dinner to deliver the kind of line you usually reserve for failed democracies: press freedom in the US is "under siege" thanks to the Trump administration arresting Don Lemon and sending the FBI to ransack Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home. Agents reportedly seized her electronic devices, because nothing screams "totally normal presidency" like treating reporters’ laptops as enemy combatants.
Pelosi called the arrest and raid "an affront to press freedom meant to scare, chill and silence" — which, to be fair, is probably the most honest mission statement this White House has ever had. At the same time, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post laid off about a third of its staff, helpfully demonstrating that even when the government isn’t crushing journalism, corporate America is there to finish the job. "Democracy dies in darkness," the paper’s slogan says, while the owner switches off the newsroom lights to save on overhead.
Pelosi didn’t stop at the press. She described "a president who has crowned himself King, a Congress which has abolished itself, and a supreme court that has gone rogue" — a neat little summary of how checks and balances became more of a nostalgia brand than a functioning system. The First Amendment, she reminded everyone, is supposed to protect a free and independent press as the fourth estate. Under Trump, it’s more of a suggestion — one that can be ignored whenever the monarch-in-chief feels a little too criticized on TV.
#killing-democracy#fascism
project vault: state capitalism for fun and profit
JD Vance and Marco Rubio bravely preparing to save free markets with tariffs, subsidies, and a giant government slush pile named after a bank vault.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in "free markets": tariffs to keep prices high and a government firehose of "hundreds of billions" in capital to hand out to whichever mining executives can say "national security" with a straight face. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted the first "Critical Minerals Ministerial," carefully avoiding the word "China" while describing a problem that is, somehow, definitely not about China. Instead, it's about "foreign supply" and the urgent need to make sure investors don't have to suffer the indignity of low prices.
Project Vault, Trump's shiny new $12bn critical mineral reserve, is being sold as a patriotic shield against Beijing's leverage, but it looks suspiciously like a taxpayer-funded prize pool for companies like MP Materials and Lithium Americas. Special assistant David Copley cheerfully promises the US will "deploy hundreds of billions of capital into the mining sector"—a phrase that, in Trumpworld, usually translates to someone's friends are getting very rich very fast. Meanwhile, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is cooking up "coordinated trade policies" with Japan and the EU, which sounds less like multilateralism and more like an oligarchs' club for carving up the periodic table.
China, for its part, is gently reminding everyone about "market economy" principles while it tightens and loosens export controls whenever it wants something in trade talks. The US response? Build a state-run mineral hoard, rig prices with tariffs, and pray nobody notices that the same crowd that screams about socialism is now running a centrally planned resource strategy with all the transparency of a locked safe. The rarest earth of all remains accountability.
#forever-grifting#money#oligarchy
treasury bro discovers congressional oversight is not a podcast
Scott Bessent discovering, in real time, that a House hearing is not a Fox Business segment he can talk over.
The Trump Treasury’s new money man, Scott Bessent, went to the House Financial Services Committee to explain why the president’s economic agenda is definitely not just vibes and tax cuts for donors. Ranking Democrat Maxine Waters did the unthinkable in Trump’s America: she tried to get a straight answer on whether this administration is actually committed to lowering prices for normal humans and not just juicing the stock portfolios of everyone who has Mar-a-Lago on speed dial.
The hearing quickly shifted from "routine oversight" to "family Thanksgiving with cameras" as Bessent dodged and deflected his way through questions until Waters finally asked the Republican chair to "shut him up" so she could actually do her job. Bessent, channeling the full wounded dignity of a man unused to consequences, responded by telling Waters to "maintain some level of dignity"—because nothing screams respect for institutions like a Trump official lecturing Congress about decorum while refusing to give clear answers on how their policies are squeezing Americans.
So the economic plan remains the same: prices are high, accountability is low, and the administration treats congressional oversight like an annoying pop-up ad. Authoritarian vibes, zero customer service.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid
trump discovers taiwan is worth exactly 8 million extra tonnes of soybeans
Two guys who definitely aren’t trading away anyone’s democracy for soybeans and photo ops, why do you ask?
Xi Jinping picked up the phone to remind Donald Trump that Taiwan is "China's territory" and that the US should be very "prudent" about shipping weapons to the island. Trump, naturally, emerged from the call declaring it "excellent" and "long and thorough" — which is how he describes everything from peace talks to lunch — while Beijing's state media framed the chat as China patiently teaching the class dunce about "stability" and "responsibility".
The Trump team just greenlit an $11 billion arms sale to Taipei — rocket launchers, howitzers, missiles, the usual "please don't invade us" starter pack — and Xi gently suggested that maybe Washington dial it back unless everyone wants a live-fire sequel to the Taiwan Strait Crises. Trump, ever the master strategist, countered with his favorite foreign-policy doctrine: soybeans first. He bragged that China might buy 20 million tonnes of US soybeans instead of 12 million, as if the fate of a 23-million-strong democracy should be negotiated like a Costco bulk discount.
While Xi talks about "sovereignty" and "territorial integrity" and Trump posts about his "extremely good" personal relationship with Xi on Truth Social, Taiwan’s president is over here insisting ties with the US are still "rock solid" and all the defense cooperation is continuing. Translation: Taipei is desperately hoping the island’s security isn’t being quietly horse-traded for tariff rollbacks, TikTok deals, and a photo op in Beijing. But don’t worry — Chinese state media assures us China is a "stabilising force" and a "responsible major power". If there’s one thing this era keeps proving, it’s that when authoritarian leaders and Trump say "stability," they mostly mean their power, your risk.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy#forever-grifting
trump fact-checks reality, reality loses
President Trump, mid-sentence, carefully explaining how 3% inflation is actually the worst in history if you close your eyes and really believe in yourself.
Donald Trump sat down with NBC and treated the Oval Office like his old reality show set, except now the lies come with ICE raids and tariff policy. He claimed he inherited "the worst inflation in the history of our country" — which is a bold statement for a guy whose own tariffs helped nudge prices back up from the relatively tame 3% he walked into. The actual record-holder is 1980 at over 14%, but why let the Federal Reserve’s data get in the way of a good self-pity monologue?
He bragged that there are more people working than ever, which is technically true in the same way that saying "I built the tallest sandcastle" is technically true when you showed up at low tide. Job growth has cratered since he took office again, wage growth is slowing, and his magical “$18 trillion” in investment shrinks to roughly half that when you look at his own website — and then shrinks again once you strip out pre-Trump announcements and fantasy pledges from sovereign funds and data-center fever dreams. It’s less an investment boom and more a PowerPoint boom.
On immigration, Trump repeated his favorite genre: horror fanfic presented as policy justification. He insisted his administration is "totally focused on criminals" even though more than a third of ICE arrests in his first nine months were people with no criminal record. He then tossed out a very precise 11,888 “murderers” supposedly “let in” by Biden, which turns out to be a decadeslong count of noncitizens convicted of homicide, many of whom arrived under multiple presidents and are already in state or federal prisons. He also inflated Biden-era illegal crossings from 7.4–10.2 million (depending on how you count) to 25 million, because if you’re going to demonize migrants, you might as well round up by a casual fifteen million.
And throughout, he waved around “record low crime” like a participation trophy, using real declines to launder his fantasy border numbers and justify broad, indiscriminate enforcement. The pattern is the same: cook the stats, scare the public, then claim a mandate for ever-harsher crackdowns. It’s not policy, it’s a vibes-based security state — with fact-checkers playing whack-a-mole while the administration quietly builds the machinery to treat entire categories of people as criminals first and human beings never.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
trump declares putin kept his promise, ukraine dodges 71 missiles in gratitude
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Trump checks his watch and announces the ceasefire is over, right on schedule with the first missile impact.
Trump, statesman of the Chuck E. Cheese school of diplomacy, proudly announced that Vladimir Putin “kept his word” on a weeklong ceasefire — a ceasefire that, according to Ukraine and independent analysts, ended with Russia launching 71 missiles and 450 drones at civilian energy infrastructure in the middle of a brutal winter. But don’t worry, the president insists the promise was Sunday to Sunday, so when the bombs started falling again, Putin was just exercising his sacred right to mass-murder on a technicality.
While millions of Ukrainians sit in the dark with no heat because Russia is deliberately targeting power plants that have “no military value whatsoever”, Trump is out here grading Putin on a curve like a disappointed but loyal soccer dad: he “kept his word on that” and then “hit them hard last night.” The Institute for the Study of War gently notes that Russia never intended to de-escalate or seriously engage in U.S.-initiated peace talks, but the White House appears content so long as the dictator-in-chief took Trump’s personal weather request under brief consideration.
Zelensky, standing next to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in front of a bombed-out heating plant, has the audacity to suggest that maybe, just maybe, a regime that carpet-bombs power grids in subzero temperatures “broke its promise.” Trump, meanwhile, explains that “we’ll take anything, because it’s really, really cold over there” — as if the bar for American diplomacy is now: did the war criminal at least wait until after my arbitrary calendar cut-off to resume terrorizing civilians? Exceptional work all around.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
trump heroically recuses himself from the deal he quietly invested in
Business reporter explains, with a straight face, that the president buying bonds tied to a merger he publicly weighed in on is totally fine because the White House pinky-swore there’s no conflict.
Donald Trump has magnanimously decided to "stay out of" the Netflix–Paramount Skydance cage match over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is very generous of him considering he quietly bought up to $2 million in Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery bonds right after the deal was announced. He once bragged he'd "be involved in that decision" because of antitrust concerns, but now says he'll let the Justice Department handle it. When you’ve already placed your bets, you can really afford to respect institutional independence.
Adding a little extra seasoning of sleaze, one of the bidders is run by David Ellison, son of Trump megadonor Larry Ellison, who just happens to control Paramount. So we’ve got: a sitting president with a close relationship to one bidder’s billionaire backer, personal financial exposure to the other bidder and the target company, and a public history of attacking the media entities involved. The White House, with a straight face, insists there are no conflicts of interest here, which is technically true if you define "conflict" as "something we admit exists."
Meanwhile, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos goes to the Senate to swear the merger will be great for competition, workers, and democracy, while Republicans yell about "woke" content and Democrats pretend antitrust law still functions. Somewhere in the middle of this corporate Thunderdome, the president’s portfolio is just quietly waiting to see which way the DOJ — that he constantly pressures — will rule. Truly, the free market at work.
#forever-grifting#corruption
