aipac discovers its money is radioactive, keeps spending anyway
Aipac’s latest innovation: influence-peddling so unpopular it has to show up wearing a fake mustache and calling itself “Affordable Chicago Now.”
Aipac, the lobby that spent decades insisting it was just the voice of bipartisan common sense, is now shoveling at least $13.7 million through Super PACs with names like "Elect Chicago Women" and "Affordable Chicago Now"—which is a bold rebrand for "We Definitely Don’t Want You to Know This Is About Israel." The ads never mention Israel, Gaza, or even foreign policy, because nothing says "confident in our cause" like hiding behind generic civic virtue and a P.O. box.
The donor patterns look like they were generated by a bored intern with an Excel macro: the same Aipac-aligned donors cutting identical checks to three different House candidates, sometimes on the same day, while the Super PACs conveniently won’t reveal their funders until on or around election day. Meanwhile, Democratic voters have moved sharply toward sympathy with Palestinians and against endless war, so the Aipac brand has become so toxic that even its own beneficiaries are now denouncing Trump’s Iran strikes as "dangerous," "unconstitutional," and evidence he has "lost his mind"—while still quietly courting the same money they claim to find appalling.
The result is a farce where Aipac praises Trump’s bombing of Iran, but its chosen Democrats in Illinois sprint away from the war like it’s on fire, and some of them publicly beg their shadowy backers to reveal their donors and "hit a wall." In one heavily Jewish district, the Aipac-aligned hit jobs on a mildly critical, pro-Israel mayor may well boost a Palestinian American progressive to Congress instead. It’s a masterclass in how to spend tens of millions of dollars to prove that your influence is still enormous, your judgment is terrible, and your political touch is about as subtle as Trump’s foreign policy.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
retiring senator discovers spine, limited-time offer only
Thom Tillis and Adam Schiff pretend this is a normal oversight hearing and not an annual review for an administration that keeps accidentally killing its own citizens.
Thom Tillis has entered his ‘say the quiet part out loud’ phase of retirement, and the target list is getting interesting. He torched Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem over her little "immigration agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis" problem and called her tenure a "disaster" before Trump finally fired her. You know things are going great when the internal performance review for DHS is: "Your deportation death squad is creating bad optics, ma’am."
Freed from the terror of a Trump-backed primary, Tillis is suddenly auditioning for the role of conscience of the Senate GOP – while still insisting he wants Trump to go down as the most successful Republican president in history. So he’s blasting Stephen Miller, blocking Kevin Warsh’s nomination to the Fed over a sketchy justice department investigation into Jerome Powell, and generally running around the Capitol like a middle manager who just realized the company is committing crimes on the conference call.
Democrats, naturally, are thrilled to have a Republican who occasionally acknowledges reality, because they need his North Carolina seat to flip the Senate. Tillis, naturally, insists he’s doing all this to help Trump by steering him away from the worst advice. The plan, apparently, is to salvage American democracy by politely fact-checking the guy who built a cult of personality, unleashed a mass deportation regime, and keeps firing people after their policies get citizens killed. Bold strategy.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
democrats discover voters exist between elections
A Swing Left volunteer attempts the most radical experiment in modern U.S. politics: asking a voter what they actually think before demanding their soul and their Tuesday.
New NBC polling confirms a stunning development: in the grand American trust Olympics, Donald Trump, ICE, and a late medieval pope all beat the Democratic party. When you’re losing to a 13th-century pontiff and the deportation police, it might be time to admit the vibes are off.
Swing Left, a grassroots group born from the 2016 “oh God what have we done” moment, has decided that maybe the way to fix a system everyone thinks is rigged is to talk to people before they’re standing in a voting booth. Instead of the usual last-minute, data-bro drive‑by texts and app scripts that boil human beings down to a 1–5 scale, they’re doing “deep canvassing” — actual conversations, at actual doors, with actual humans. Then they feed those messy, real-world feelings into AI, which is now apparently the only thing in American politics expected to listen.
The Federal Election Commission helpfully joined the fun in 2024 by blessing direct coordination between federal candidates and outside groups on paid canvassing, allowing outfits like Swing Left to build full-blown campaigns-in-waiting for when candidates finally show up with a slogan and a merch store. So now we have a system where the parties are distrusted, the voters think the system is broken, and the solution is to outsource listening to a nonprofit that outsources comprehension to a large language model. Democracy: now with extra middleware.
From Kingston, New York, the message coming back is painfully consistent: people feel the country is too divided, they’re choosing between the “lesser of two evils,” and the whole thing is rigged against working people who are just trying to wake up, go to work, and pay bills that keep getting bigger. Or, put more simply: after Trump, Biden, and a decade of institutional face‑plants, voters are finally saying out loud what the political class has spent years pretending not to hear — the system is broken. The question is whether talking to them a few months earlier and transcribing their despair into an app will fix it, or just give us much higher‑resolution data on the collapse.
#killing-democracy#trumps-america
trump dusts off 1909 spy law to own the border crossers
Behold the cutting edge of U.S. national defense: a rusting fence, a warning sign, and a DOJ pretending desperate migrants are 1909-era saboteurs casing an arsenal.
The second Trump administration has decided that if you can’t run an immigration system, you can at least cosplay a military junta. Trump declared a border “national defense area,” handed it to the Pentagon, and his DOJ promptly started charging migrants not just with illegal entry, but with trespassing on military property under a law originally meant to keep spies away from ammo depots. Jose Omar Flores-Penaloza admitted he crossed illegally and was ready to be deported, but prosecutors insisted on branding him a quasi–national security threat for walking through a patch of desert he didn’t even know had been magically converted into Fort MAGA.
Courts, inconveniently for the strongman aesthetic, keep pointing out that you generally need mens rea — a guilty mind — to convict someone of trespassing, and that 4,700 migrants do not become enemy agents just because Donald Trump signed a paper and slapped "national defense" on some scrubland. At least nine judges in West Texas and New Mexico have found the cases legally deficient, and about 60% of the trespass charges have been dropped or dismissed. Yet DOJ keeps filing them anyway and appealing the losses, because the point isn’t law enforcement, it’s punishment and deterrence by process: keep people in jail, flood the courts, and dare the judiciary to stop them.
Meanwhile, habeas petitions from immigration detainees are at record highs, and even government attorneys are melting down in court — one literally telling a Minnesota judge, “The system sucks. This job sucks.” That’s the sound of a legal system being repurposed from administering justice to running a glorified intimidation campaign at the border. National emergency apparently now means “we’ll resurrect a century-old anti-spy statute, ignore basic criminal law principles, and see how much authoritarian theater the courts will tolerate.”
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
trump’s save act: saving america from voting
Senate Republicans prepare to defend democracy by making sure fewer people can participate in it.
Senate Republicans are gearing up to rubber-stamp the so-called SAVE America Act, a voting "overhaul" that just happens to be Donald Trump’s top priority. When a twice-impeached, coup-curious ex-president obsessed with imaginary voter fraud wants to "fix" elections, you don’t need a law degree to guess who’s getting saved and who’s getting quietly thrown off the voter rolls.
NPR politely calls it a "controversial" bill, which is one way to describe a Trump-backed scheme to reengineer how Americans vote after he spent years insisting any election he doesn’t win is illegitimate. Republicans in the Senate, having learned precisely nothing from January 6 except that accountability is optional, are lining up to help him rewire the system so future defeats can be prevented at the application stage. Why persuade voters when you can just redesign the electorate?
The details aren’t in this snippet, but we all know the franchise-by-a-thousand-papers routine: more hurdles, more red tape, more hoops, all carefully branded as "security" and "integrity" while functioning as a loyalty test to Trumpism. The SAVE America Act isn’t about saving America; it’s about saving Trump from the terrifying prospect of a fair vote count.
#killing-democracy#fascism
british tories audition for role of trump’s favorite vassal state
British conservatives lining up outside Mar-a-Lago, clutching Union Jacks and CVs, hoping to be promoted from "special relationship" to "loyal satellite" in the Trump–Musk empire.
Once upon a time, British conservatives saw themselves as the wise "Greeks" guiding the big, dumb American "Romans" through the empire business. Now, post–second Trump term, the UK right has traded the toga for a red hat and is begging to be ideologically colonized by MAGA. The people who used to sneer at McDonald’s and baseball caps are now importing US culture-war scripts wholesale, yelling about "woke" – a Black American term – as if it came standard with the Magna Carta.
The new fantasy on the British right isn’t empire; it’s vassal status. Far-right figures like Tommy Robinson are openly musing about Trump militarily intervening in Britain to remove Keir Starmer, because nothing says "sovereignty" like inviting a foreign strongman to send the tanks. Nigel Farage, Enoch Powell cosplayer and part-time Fox News furniture, sprints to US TV to trash his own prime minister and pledge fealty to Trump’s Iran adventures. Meanwhile, Trump’s former "co-president" Elon Musk is busy treating Britain like a cut‑rate Delaware with castles, fixated on its banks, offshore havens, and pliable elites as the next node in his global billionaire protection network.
What’s left of British conservatism is now a franchise operation: US oligarchs provide the platforms, money, and algorithmic rage; UK populists supply the accents and the anti-immigrant bile. From Rupert Lowe to Katie Hopkins fantasizing about Trump himself, the message is clear: if you’re willing to trash your own democracy, undermine your own government, and swear loyalty to the MAGA project, there might just be a place for you on Musk’s timeline and Trump’s next coup-adjacent group chat. Empire may be dead, but client-state fascism is having a moment.
#oligarchy#killing-democracy
europe suddenly notices the nuclear football is a mood ring
Ed Davey bravely announcing that maybe, just maybe, the world’s oldest democracy shouldn’t outsource its apocalypse button to Donald Trump’s emotional stability.
British Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has arrived at the same conclusion every NATO planner has been screaming into a pillow since 2017: if your nuclear deterrent depends on whatever Donald Trump had for breakfast, you do not, in fact, have a deterrent. The UK’s Trident missiles are leased from the US, maintained by the US, and effectively operated at the pleasure of whichever reality‑TV landlord is currently rage‑tweeting from the Oval Office. So Davey’s big idea is that maybe, just maybe, Britain shouldn’t tie its national survival to Trump’s blood sugar levels.
Davey points out that American support for European security is now openly "conditional" on doing whatever Trump wants on trade, China, or basic ego maintenance, rather than on those boring old "values and alliances" that held for 80 years. Translation: NATO’s Article 5 has been replaced with Article Like and Subscribe. He cites Trump’s Greenland annexation cosplay and his refusal to seriously confront Putin over Ukraine as Exhibit A and B in the "this ally might actually be a saboteur" file.
So the Lib Dems are now arguing for a fully sovereign British nuclear capability, built and maintained at home, at the cost of billions over two decades. The pitch: instead of funneling taxpayer cash into the American defense industry so Trump can hold Europe hostage for compliments, Britain should at least develop the ability to blow up the world without asking Washington’s permission first. They still claim to support multilateral disarmament, of course—just not the version where your arsenal only works if the US president isn’t currently throwing a tantrum on Fox News.
#killing-democracy#national-security
texas gop senate primary becomes audition to wreck democracy
John Cornyn and Ken Paxton compete to see who can light the filibuster on fire faster while Trump judges from offstage like an authoritarian Simon Cowell.
Donald Trump is sitting on his Texas Senate endorsement like a game show host deciding which contestant is most willing to smash the democracy button. Sen. John Cornyn and indicted state Attorney General Ken Paxton are in a runoff, and both have figured out that the secret password is "destroy the filibuster to pass my national voter suppression bill." Cornyn, who spent his career hymning the sacred 60-vote rule, has now announced he’ll support "whatever changes" are necessary to pass Trump’s so-called SAVE America Act — which is like calling a bank robbery the SAVE Banking Initiative.
The bill, already through the House, would impose a federal MAGA wish list on all 50 states: proof-of-citizenship to register, photo ID to vote everywhere, and a federalized voter-fraud panic dressed up as "election integrity." Trump then helpfully lies about what’s in it, adding his own fantasy provisions — "no men in women’s sports" and "no mail-in voting" — because why not turn voting rights into a Fox News chyron buffet. Asked which candidate he’ll back, Trump shrugs that he "likes both" and that "a lot" depends on who will help him bulldoze the rules to jam this through. So the Republican primary isn’t about policy, experience, or competence; it’s about who will more eagerly help rewrite the rules of elections to keep one guy and his movement in power.
Republicans in the Senate almost certainly don’t have the votes to kill the filibuster, which is the only reason this isn’t an immediate five-alarm fire. But the party that once treated the filibuster as a constitutional sacrament is now happy to dynamite it — not for health care, not for gun reform, not for anything that might actually help people — but to make it harder for the wrong citizens to vote. Democracy is now a loyalty test: pledge fealty to Trump’s election-rigging project, and maybe he’ll bless your campaign. Refuse, and enjoy being labeled a RINO who hates "secure elections."
#killing-democracy#fascism#anti-immigration
fcc cosplay: brendan carr auditions as trump’s media censor
Brendan Carr, thoughtfully explaining that the First Amendment is still totally intact, it just doesn’t apply to coverage that makes Dear Leader look bad.
Brendan Carr, the FCC chair and newly self-appointed Minister of Truth, hopped on social media to remind broadcasters that their licenses are apparently contingent on flattering coverage of Donald Trump’s Iran adventure. Carr warned that outlets spreading what he calls "hoaxes and news distortions" about the war could see their spectrum permits revoked — because nothing says "public interest" like a government official threatening to shut down news organizations that annoy the president.
Trump, naturally, is thrilled. He raged on Truth Social that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other "Lowlife 'Papers'" supposedly want the U.S. to lose the war, accusing them of publishing headlines that are "the exact opposite" of reality. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth chimed in from the war room-slash-green-room, scolding coverage of a "Mideast war" and suggesting more upbeat options like "Iran increasingly desperate" — a bold programming note from a guy who talks about bombing countries like he’s pitching a Fox & Friends segment.
While new CNN owner David Ellison publicly promises editorial independence, Hegseth helpfully hints that the network will be better once the billionaire finishes redecorating the newsroom. Carr, for his part, cites plummeting trust in "legacy media" as justification for using federal control of the airwaves — a public asset — as a political cattle prod. He even dredges up 2024 election coverage to complain that the press predicted a Democratic win before Trump’s "landslide" plurality, as if bad polling entitles the government to start yanking broadcast licenses.
So the Trump administration’s position is now crystal clear: the media is "sick and demented," coverage that isn’t sufficiently triumphalist is a "hoax," and the guy in charge of regulating the airwaves is openly musing about shutting down noncompliant outlets. Freedom of the press, reimagined as a conditional privilege you keep only if you cheer loudly enough for the war.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump pardon whisperer allegedly upgrades to full mob movie
Artist’s impression of the modern Trump-era clemency process: a briefcase of cash, a pardon application, and someone being encouraged to get into a car with masked men.
The MAGA legal ecosystem has really gone prestige TV. New York lobbyist and attorney Joshua Nass — who proudly cashed $100,000 to lobby Donald Trump for a presidential pardon and “executive clemency” for nursing-home tax scofflaw Joseph Schwartz — has now been charged with attempted Hobbs Act extortion of a former client and the client’s son over an alleged $500,000 debt. Prosecutors say Nass handed over phone numbers and home addresses to an enforcer and told him to “do anything and everything” to force payment, including physically assaulting the client’s son or stuffing him into a car with masked men to terrify the family into coughing up cash. You know, the classic "client relations" module from law school.
Prosecutors allege Nass agreed to pay his would‑be legbreaker at least $15,000 for the intimidation services, because if you’re going to shake down your own client, you might as well itemize it. This is the same guy who, in public filings, boasted of being paid $100,000 in late 2025 “for advocacy concerning executive clemency and post-conviction relief, including federal presidential pardon advocacy” — work that coincided nicely with Trump’s November 14, 2025 pardon of Schwartz, whose nursing-home empire somehow forgot to pay nearly $40m in taxes and faced Medicaid fraud charges. Truly the poster child for “deserving individuals” in need of a second chance.
Nass recently told the New York Times that clemency “reflects the belief that people are capable of redemption” and that Trump “should be commended” for his generosity with pardons during his second term. Meanwhile, the justice department is accusing this apostle of redemption of running a low-rent extortion plot against his own client. All of this unfolds as reports pile up that Trump’s clemency system is shaped by lobbyists and moneyed fixers, a claim the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismisses with a straight face, insisting that anyone spending money to lobby for pardons is just wasting it and that Trump doesn’t even know who these lobbyists are. Sure — the checks clear themselves, the pardons sign themselves, and the lawyers allegedly threaten to kidnap people out of pure constitutional passion.
So on one side, you have a president whose pardon pen mysteriously tracks six‑figure payments and evangelical connections; on the other, a pardon middleman now facing up to 20 years in prison for allegedly trying to collect his fees like a discount movie mobster. What an inspiring model of justice: redemption for the well-connected, prosecution for the hired help that says the quiet part out loud.
#forever-grifting#corruption
trump bans palestinian actor from oscars, really taking that 'no politics in movies' thing literally
Scene missing: Palestinian actor barred by Trump’s travel ban, bravely protected America by staying thousands of miles away from the Dolby Theatre.
The Trump White House has discovered a bold new frontier in culture war: blocking a Palestinian actor from walking a red carpet. Motaz Malhees, star of Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab – about a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza – says he can’t attend the Academy Awards because Trump’s latest travel ban bars people whose documents are issued or endorsed by the Palestinian Authority. Nothing says "land of the free" like telling an actor he’s too dangerous to sit in a room with Ryan Gosling and a bunch of agents.
Trump’s December proclamation, which "fully restricts and limits" entry for Palestinians on alleged security grounds, kicked in on 1 January, just in time to make sure the US remains safe from the terrifying menace of foreign film nominees. Malhees’s fellow Palestinian cast members can attend because they have other citizenships, but he only holds a Palestinian passport – so he gets to watch the ceremony from afar while America bravely defends itself from… an actor who plays a call center worker.
And because the administration never stops at one rights violation when it can stack them, Trump has also been trying to deport pro-Palestinian voices already in the US. Leqaa Kordia, who lost more than 170 family members in Gaza, has been detained for a year despite multiple orders for her release; an immigration judge has now ordered her freed again, and the government is apparently treating those rulings like spam emails. This isn’t "security"; it’s a political loyalty test wrapped in immigration law, with Hollywood as collateral damage and Palestinians as the designated villains of Trump’s ongoing authoritarian fan fiction.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
trump tries to outlaw the first amendment, loses to a guy with a lighter
A veteran torches a piece of cloth while the president torches the Constitution, and only one of them gets charged for it.
The Justice Department has quietly backed away from one of Trump’s more openly authoritarian fantasies: jailing people for engaging in speech the Supreme Court has explicitly said is protected. Prosecutors dropped charges against Jan “Jay” Carey, a 55-year-old combat veteran who burned an American flag in Lafayette Square the same day Trump signed his "crackdown" executive order on flag burning. Carey’s crime? Saying out loud that he was protesting an "illegal fascist president" and then exercising exactly the First Amendment rights Trump was trying to stomp on.
Rather than explain why they spent months trying to make an example of a veteran who served in Iraq, Bosnia, and Afghanistan, DOJ just slunk away before a deadline to answer his lawyers’ argument that the whole case was an unconstitutional hit job. Carey’s attorney, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, called it a "very significant victory" for free speech, which is a polite way of saying the administration got caught using federal prosecutors as Trump’s personal feelings police.
Flag burning has been protected since a 1989 Supreme Court ruling, but Trump, ever the constitutional scholar, ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to "vigorously prosecute" it anyway because it’s supposedly a statement of "contempt, hostility, and violence against our nation" that might "incite violence and riot." Unlike a president calling journalists enemies of the people, trying to overturn elections, or encouraging mobs to storm the Capitol, which apparently fall under the robust new doctrine of "patriotic expression." In the end, one veteran with a match did more for the First Amendment than the entire Justice Department was willing to do until a court deadline forced them to stop pretending this wasn’t blatantly political persecution.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
the jolene doctrine: bomb them just because you can
Trump’s foreign policy team workshopping new lyrics to “Jolene” between airstrikes and Greenland invasion plans.
Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal has helpfully given Trump’s second-term foreign policy a name: the “Jolene doctrine” — as in, the Dolly Parton lyric, “don’t take him just because you can.” Except in this version, it’s: “don’t abduct foreign leaders, assassinate supreme leaders, and level schools full of girls just because you can,” and Trump replies, politically speaking, “challenge accepted.” Since Christmas, Trump has ordered murky airstrikes in Nigeria, a snatch-and-grab of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro for narco-terrorism charges, and a joint US-Israel strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, while his administration flails around trying to define what “victory” even means.
While historians politely describe the Trump team as acting like an “unbridled Jolene,” the real-world translation is closer to: unhinged superpower with cruise missiles. The Iran conflict now includes Trump trying to dodge responsibility for the bombing of a girls’ school that killed at least 175 people, mostly children, because nothing says “leader of the free world” like mass civilian casualties and a press strategy. In the middle of all this, Trump briefly threatens military action to seize Greenland — again — managing to alienate NATO allies who are already watching this administration treat alliances like expired coupons.
The White House, naturally, insists Trump has restored America’s “place as leader of the free world,” which is one way to describe a country other nations now view as a heavily armed Jolene, wandering the globe, doing whatever it wants simply because nobody can wrestle the launch codes out of its hands. McChrystal, who spent a career inside the machine, gently suggests that maybe, just maybe, blowing things up on a whim and trashing alliances isn’t a long-term strategy. The Trump team, however, appears fully committed to the Jolene doctrine: if we can do it, we must. Consequences are for lesser countries.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
state department discovers 'talking' after trying 'slow-motion strangulation'
Pictured: a friendly diplomatic partner explaining that the beatings will continue until democracy improves.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has confirmed that Havana is in talks with the U.S., which is what happens when your neighbor spends years tightening an oil chokehold and then graciously offers to chat about the mess they helped create. Washington calls it "pressure"; people standing in hours-long fuel lines might have a spicier word.
Instead of reversing the sanctions regime that helped push Cuba into an energy crisis, the U.S. is apparently workshopping its favorite tactic: manufacture the humanitarian disaster, then show up as the deeply concerned arsonist asking how the fire is going. The message to the region is clear: obey Washington, or enjoy your rolling blackouts and empty gas stations.
While TV anchors politely describe it as "discussions amid an oil blockade," the real template is the same old Monroe Doctrine DLC pack: weaponize the economy, destabilize the government, and then pretend it's all about democracy and freedom. Because nothing says "rules-based international order" quite like throttling a country's access to fuel and then negotiating over the rubble you helped create.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
marco rubio speedruns the entire national security apparatus
Marco Rubio, proudly posing as Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and understudy for every other job Trump hasn’t bothered to fill correctly.
Marco Rubio has apparently unlocked the "all-you-can-hoard" buffet of national security jobs, serving as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to Donald Trump, a president once again "shaking the world order" like a snow globe filled with nuclear launch codes. Why have checks and balances when you can just stack every key foreign policy role on one ambitious Florida man whose main qualification is never, ever telling the boss no?
NPR tees it up politely, asking what Rubio's role really is, as if the answer isn't "whatever Trump needs done without Congress, career diplomats, or basic oversight getting in the way." With the same guy running diplomacy and the NSC, the interagency process becomes a fun little game where Marco consults Marco, overrules Marco, and then reports back to Marco about Marco's decision. The world order may be shaking, but at least the loyalty structure is rock solid.
So while Dexter Filkins calmly explains this arrangement on public radio, the real headline is that Trump has effectively turned U.S. foreign policy into a one-man show starring Rubio as both Good Cop and National Security Cop. Separation of powers? Institutional guardrails? No, no, we do vibes now.
#killing-democracy#fascism
ric grenell leaves the trump kennedy center, the branding remains like a stain
Ric Grenell arriving at the Kennedy Center premiere of "MELANIA," a title that really tells you everything you need to know about where American culture has been taken hostage.
Ric Grenell, Trump’s all-purpose errand boy and "envoy for special missions" (subtle), is stepping down as head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — or as Dear Leader has decided it should be called, THE TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER. Because if there’s one thing the arts needed, it was the aesthetic sensibilities of a man who decorates like Louis XIV got a concussion at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump announced on Truth Social that Grenell will be replaced by Matt Floca, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of facilities operations, just in time for a two-year renovation. So the guy who actually knows how the building works will run it, while the guy who knew how to plaster Trump’s name on it and drive away artists moves on to his next "special mission." Progress, in the loosest possible sense.
The Trump-appointed board already voted in December to rename the venue by bolting Trump’s name onto a memorial that exists because of an act of Congress, which naturally prompted a lawsuit from people who can read laws. That little branding exercise also sparked a wave of performance cancellations, because shockingly, musicians and artists weren’t lining up to celebrate the fusion of JFK’s legacy with the guy who tried to overthrow an election.
So Grenell exits stage right, the lawsuits keep rolling, the building shuts down for two years, and Trump still gets to scream in all caps about "THE TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER" like he just conquered Broadway. American cultural institutions are being treated like failed casinos: slap his name on, hollow it out, and leave someone else to deal with the wreckage.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump tries to perp-walk monetary policy
Jerome Powell, apparently moments away from being charged with aggravated renovation for not cutting interest rates fast enough.
The Justice Department’s latest cosplay as a mob collections agency just hit a wall. A federal judge blocked Trump’s DOJ from subpoenaing Fed chair Jerome Powell over some allegedly scandalous building renovations, noting there was a “mountain of evidence” that the whole thing was just a pressure campaign to make Powell slash interest rates or resign. The court helpfully observed that DOJ had produced “essentially zero evidence” of any crime, which is a pretty bold way of saying: this isn’t law enforcement, it’s a shakedown.
Trump has spent the past year publicly calling the guy he appointed in 2018 “stupid” and “too slow” for not tanking rates on command, and now—what a coincidence!—his administration is trying to criminalize cost overruns on a construction project. Meanwhile, GOP senator Thom Tillis briefly remembered what a spine is, warning that appealing the ruling will just delay confirming Trump’s preferred replacement, Kevin Warsh, who just happens to be more eager to do the president’s bidding on cheap money.
As a bonus authoritarian side quest, the Supreme Court is weighing Trump’s attempt to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook over mortgage-fraud allegations that look suspiciously selective, given that even his own Treasury secretary Scott Bessent allegedly played similar games on his paperwork. So the Trump White House is now trying to purge and intimidate central bankers with criminal probes and loyalty tests, then insisting this is all about good governance and not, say, turning the Federal Reserve into Mar-a-Lago’s in-house ATM.
#killing-democracy#fascism
tsa now accepting donations, dignity not included
Proud superpower asks passengers to remove shoes, belts, and spare change for the TSA relief fund.
America’s latest innovation in public safety: your airport security is now partially crowdfunded. With Trump’s second-term shutdown grinding on for months while Republicans demand harder, faster mass deportations, TSA agents are still working without pay and airports around the country are putting out the tip jar. Denver, Seattle, Vegas, Reno, Cleveland, Orlando, New York, New Jersey – all passing the hat so the people guarding the planes can afford baby formula and gas.
This isn’t just humiliating, it’s bureaucratically humiliating. Federal ethics rules say agents can’t accept cash or Visa gift cards and every donation has to be under $20, so we’ve reached the stage of late‑empire collapse where the government both refuses to pay its workers and micromanages the value of the grocery cards strangers are allowed to give them. Las Vegas literally had to reopen the food pantry it first launched during Trump’s last record-breaking shutdown, because nothing says “strong economy” like your essential workforce lining up for canned beans.
Meanwhile, Democrats are trying to pass narrow bills to fund TSA, FEMA, and other non-ICE bits of DHS, and Senate Republicans are blocking them so ICE and CBP – the beloved shock troops of Trump’s mass deportation campaign – don’t miss out. Security lines are stretching to the parking lot, agents are openly saying “nothing happens until the public feels some pain,” and the administration has basically turned air travel into a live demonstration of what hostage governance looks like. Welcome to Trump’s America: where the planes still fly, but only because the people keeping them safe are too broke to quit.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
president phrenology blames terrorism on 'bad genes'
Trump, moments before explaining that public safety can be solved with a tape measure, a caliper, and a copy of Mein Kampf for Dummies.
The president went on Fox News Radio and helpfully clarified that the real problem behind a string of recent attacks is not, say, guns, terrorism, or foreign policy blowback, but "the genetics" of the assailants. Some of them, Trump explained, "were let in here" and "shouldn’t have been," while others are just inherently "bad" because, as he put it, "the genetics are not exactly your genetic." Congratulations, we’ve now upgraded from "poisoning the blood" to a full-on presidential TED Talk in eugenics.
Trump pinned the presence of the gunmen on immigration policies under Biden and past presidents, turning three separate incidents — an ISIS-supporting shooter in Virginia, a Lebanese-American whose family was just killed in an Israeli strike, and ISIS-inspired bomb throwers in New York — into one big genetic morality play about why immigrants are dangerous by birthright. Policy, context, and basic humanity are out; hereditary criminality is in.
This is not a one-off brain glitch. Trump has been workshopping his genetics bit for years: praising "very strong" family genes at a Medal of Honor ceremony, raving about "good genetics" when ogling a Navy officer, and posting about NFL quarterback Shedeur Sanders' "GreatGenes" like a racist QVC host. He’s also previously said immigrants who become murderers have "bad genes" and accused migrants of "poisoning the blood of our country" — rhetoric Biden correctly noted was a remix of Hitler’s favorite talking points.
So the president of the United States is now openly sorting people into categories of inherently good and inherently diseased blood, and tying that to who should be allowed into the country. We’re not skating toward fascism at this point; we’re doing donuts in the parking lot of Mein Kampf with Fox News providing color commentary.
#fascism#racism
trump’s one‑month putin stimulus package
Two guys who really hate each other, which is why one keeps rearranging U.S. policy to boost the other’s oil revenue.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to fight a US‑Israel war with Iran: hand Vladimir Putin a temporary $10 billion-a-month oil voucher. Treasury Secretary and hedge-fund cosplay enthusiast Scott Bessent calls it a “tailored, short-term” waiver so countries can buy up Russian oil that sanctions had stranded at sea. Sanctions experts and people who can count call it what it is: a serious bailout for the Kremlin’s war machine in Ukraine.
This about-face comes after Washington spent months slapping 50% tariffs on Indian imports to punish Russian oil buying, only to now declare, actually, never mind, go nuts. Pro-Ukraine campaigners warn the message to Moscow is clear: just keep bombing and stalling until the West “blinks,” and eventually some American president will decide inflation polls worse than funding your invasion. Britain, Canada, and Germany are all yelling “absolutely not,” while Trump calmly rebrands “maximum pressure on Russia” as “what if we refilled Putin’s war chest a little.”
Bessent insists Russia will see only a “limited” boost, which is a fascinating way to describe billions in exports and tax revenue flowing straight into the Kremlin. Analysts say the move lets Russia clear storage, ramp production, and slide back into a “comfortable situation” if the Strait of Hormuz crisis drags on. So the new Trump doctrine is set: when global energy markets convulse, America’s answer is to turn the sanctions regime into a limited-time Putin promo sale and hope nobody notices that the supposed leader of the free world just threw Ukraine under the oil tanker.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
