Stock footage of a MOAB test blast, helpfully illustrating what Trump wants to do to both Iran and the concept of responsible foreign policy.
The White House and Pentagon are reportedly gaming out plans to drop a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb — the "mother of all bombs" — on Iran, just in case Donald Trump wakes up from a Fox-induced nap and decides it’s time to rerun his favorite 2017 airstrike. A Pentagon official, apparently speaking from the Department of Euphemisms, assured CBS that "the Department of War" (points for honesty, at least) plans for a wide range of scenarios to "execute Presidential and Secretary level direction" — which is a very polite way of saying, "if he says push the shiny red button, we’re ready."
Trump, ever the statesman, has publicly promised not to attack Iran before the midterm elections, as though war is just another rally venue he’s penciled in for after the votes are counted. He vaguely bragged about "productive conversations" with Iran, offering roughly the same level of detail he provides when explaining why his golf courses keep losing money. Meanwhile, the administration is dusting off the MOAB — a 30,000-pound, $170,000-per-shot monument to American overkill — because nothing says "diplomacy" like pre-writing the blast coordinates.
This is being framed as normal contingency planning, but the last time Trump used the MOAB, the White House treated it like a fireworks show with better ratings. Now the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal is being quietly slotted into options for Iran, hanging over a volatile region on the whims of a guy who schedules foreign policy around cable segments and campaign calendars. Totally fine, very stable governance from the people who treat potential war with Iran like a programming decision between town hall or season finale.
Eric Deters, a Trump donor who allegedly got the VIP treatment of being asked by then–U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle to wire $100,000 straight to her American Express account, has now filed a defamation lawsuit against her and her lawyers. According to prior reporting, that little "wire me six figures personally" moment helped usher Guilfoyle out of the Trump administration, because even by Trumpworld standards, directly billing your donor like he’s your corporate card starts to look less like fundraising and more like personal concierge grift.
Deters is now suing Guilfoyle and her defense attorneys Jesse Binnal and David M. Schwartz, claiming they lied about him and trashed his reputation. So we’ve reached the stage of the MAGA era where the donors are suing the influencers over who really tried to monetize whom, while everyone insists they are the wronged party. It's a perfect snapshot of the movement: a closed ecosystem where the money men, the TV faces, and the lawyers all accuse each other of lying, while the only uncontested fact is that somebody was trying to move $100,000 like it was lunch money.
What this lawsuit really underscores is the Trump-era business model: public office as a networking opportunity, donors as walking ATMs, and legal teams as full-time spin machines. The line between campaign finance, personal enrichment, and "oops, was that unethical?" is now so blurred it should qualify as abstract art. And if this is what spills out in civil court, imagine what the group chats look like.
FBI Director Kash Patel, moments before allegedly deciding that due process is for losers and Article II is his new HR software.
Nine former FBI employees are suing after being fired for the high crime of…working on the Trump classified documents investigation. No misconduct findings, no internal review, not even the traditional half-hearted HR memo — just Kash Patel allegedly waving “Article II” around like a golden ticket to purge anyone who ever touched the Mar-a-Lago files. The lawsuit says they were axed purely to satisfy Trump’s personal vendetta, because nothing says "independent law enforcement" like "the president was mad, so you’re fired."
The timing is artful in that uniquely Trump-era way: the mass firing happens over two days in February 2026, just as the U.S. and Israel are preparing strikes on Iran. While everyone’s staring at the looming war, Patel’s guy Miles Starr races in demanding access to the "Plasmic Echo" case files, conveniently getting a list of everyone who worked the documents case. Less than 48 hours later, those same names are escorted out of the building. Subtle.
It somehow gets dumber. The lawsuit suggests the purge also doubled as a distraction from Patel being caught at the Milan Olympics "chugging a beer" and spraying alcohol around the U.S. men’s hockey locker room like a frat pledge who stole dad’s security clearance. An FBI supervisor allegedly even guessed the firings were tied to that bad press. So the bureau that once took down mob bosses is now allegedly firing counterintelligence veterans to cover for the director’s locker-room bender and the president’s wounded ego. Rule of law has officially been replaced with vibes and vendettas.
These plaintiffs had over a century of combined experience in national security, leak investigations, and counterterrorism. Their reward for following the facts and the law on Trump’s stolen-documents case? Being labeled enemies of the state by the guy whose boxes they tried to retrieve, then purged by a director who apparently thinks "Article II" is a universal justification for turning the FBI into the president’s personal revenge squad.
Tom Tiffany, seen here shaking hands with voters while pretending 20-week abortion limits were handed down on stone tablets and not by the same people now begging everyone to stop asking follow-up questions.
Republican gubernatorial candidates across the country have embarked on a bold new moral journey: realizing that openly bragging about forced birth is bad for their careers. Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin, who three years ago co-sponsored a six-week ban, now serenely calls the state’s 20-week limit "settled law" — which is a fun way of saying "I’d still sign a ban, I’d just rather not talk about it while you’re standing there with a ballot." Stacy Garrity in Pennsylvania and Ty Masterson in Kansas are playing the same game: years of anti-abortion crusading, now wrapped in a soothing "let’s respect current law" blanket because 60% of Americans stubbornly insist on having rights.
The pattern isn’t subtle. John James in Michigan once compared abortion to genocide and opposed it in all cases; now he says the issue is "decided." His running mate Jay DeBoyer was caught fantasizing about using a constitutional convention to sneak in a 12-week ban, then promptly pivoted to calling abortion "settled" too. Republicans spent decades engineering the fall of Roe, and after voters noticed and started setting their hair on fire at the polls, the same crew is sprinting away from their own victory like it’s a flaming campaign ad.
Meanwhile, Democrats and groups like Planned Parenthood Votes are doing the unthinkable: replaying Republicans’ own words back to them. Democratic candidates and PACs are highlighting past anti-abortion remarks in states like Maine and Michigan, because nothing motivates voters like being reminded that the people now cooing about "respecting current law" were five minutes ago plotting how to rip it up. Anti-abortion groups such as SBA Pro-Life America are still trying to revive the crusade, but GOP candidates seem to have discovered a new life principle: abortion bans are amazing, as long as you never, ever say so near a swing voter.
So the "pro-life" movement has entered its "don’t scare the normals" phase: the laws are still on the books, the ambitions haven’t changed, but the rhetoric has been moved to the witness protection program. Voters, for their part, have correctly concluded that nothing about this is "settled" except Republicans’ willingness to lie about what they’ll do once they’re safely sworn in.
Artist’s rendering of public institutions watching two billionaires decide who owns the sky.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have apparently decided Earth is too regulated, so they're taking their billionaire slap-fight to the moon. As laid out in the interview, both men want to colonize the lunar surface, strip-mine it for resources, and stuff low Earth orbit with thousands more satellites. It's not about exploration or science; it's about who gets to own the sky, meter access to space, and bill taxpayers for the privilege.
The best part? Their "only real competition is each other," which is a poetic way of saying U.S. policy has happily outsourced a core national capability to two guys whose main qualifications are: 1) enormous government contracts and 2) a deep emotional need to be Space Emperor. While regulators nap and politicians pose for launchpad photo-ops, Musk and Bezos are quietly turning orbital infrastructure into a privatized toll road. The future of space isn’t Star Trek; it’s a HOA run by two tech oligarchs who already think they’re above the law down here.
Ken Paxton, seen here auditioning for "Senator, But Make It Indictable," as Elon Musk attempts to speedrun the tutorial level of buying a government.
American democracy, that scrappy little experiment in self-government, has now been fully converted into an in-app purchase. Elon Musk just dropped $158m into the Senate Leadership Fund and another $10m straight into a pro–Ken Paxton PAC, because if there’s one guy you want to elevate to the world’s most powerful deliberative body, it’s the indicted Texas attorney general whose brand is basically “have you tried being more corrupt?”
Republicans admitted months ago that backing Trump’s handpicked chaos muppet Paxton could cost up to $200m, so naturally the solution was to call the world’s richest man and shake him like a money tree. Paxton is struggling against James Talarico, a progressive who somehow committed the unforgivable sin of funding his campaign with mere tens of millions raised from actual donors instead of one bored oligarch trying to speedrun Citizens United.
Musk has now shelled out about $366m this cycle alone – more than he spent helping Trump in 2024 – despite solemnly promising in 2025 that he was going to dial back the political spending. As always, the only thing more flexible than Republican principles is a billionaire’s definition of "less." His PAC helpfully warns that if Democrats win, America might become "socialist, woke and borderless" – unlike the current model, which is oligarchic, lawless and paywalled, where Senate seats are essentially venture investments for tech barons and indicted officials, and voters are just the branding.
ICE agents stand outside Ilhan Omar’s home, bravely defending America from 30-year-old paperwork and sagging GOP poll numbers.
The Trump administration’s favorite hobby—turning federal law enforcement into a campaign arm—has now reached the "raid a sitting congresswoman’s house" stage. Homeland Security Investigations agents hit Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home over alleged immigration paperwork issues from the 1990s, right as Republicans are flailing into the midterms. Even ICE officials are looking at the timing and saying, essentially, yeah this smells like a political stunt, which is quite something coming from the agency that brought you family separation.
Inside ICE, agents say they’re being yanked off child exploitation and trafficking cases so they can do critical democracy-protection work like… knocking on doors across nine states to interrogate people about voter fraud before there’s any evidence. One official calls it a "waste of time"; the administration calls it Tuesday. Meanwhile, after an ICE officer shot and wounded a 28-year-old Venezuelan man in Austin, leadership briefly ordered a quiet nationwide pullback on arresting non-criminal immigrants, then pretended publicly it never happened, while field offices followed the secret "don’t put it in writing" guidance for days.
Analysts are politely noting that using ICE to target blue states, blue politicians, and voters is "a significant challenge for the reputation of law enforcement." That’s one way to describe an administration that treats badges like campaign merch. You’ve got partisan raids, statute-of-limitations gymnastics, covert enforcement freezes, and agents openly admitting they’re being used as pawns to "stoke divisive fires." Law enforcement as a midterm Hail Mary is less a policy agenda and more a killing-democracy business model.
Protesters outside the Kennedy Center, bravely attempting to preserve the radical idea that a presidential memorial to the arts should not be remodeled into the Donald J. Trump Center for Bulldozers and Hurt Feelings.
The Kennedy Center was created by Congress as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy and American arts. So naturally, Trump stacked its board with his own people, had them make him chairman, tried to slap his name on the building, close it for two years, and openly floated just tearing the whole thing down if he didn’t get enough credit. Now that Rep. Joyce Beatty is suing over this little cultural hostage situation, the White House has decided that what the Founders really meant by "executive privilege" was "the president’s secret plans for rebranding and/or demolishing the national performing arts center."
White House deputy counsel Joshua Hoyt has informed a federal judge that Trump is formally asserting the presidential communications privilege over records about the attempted two-year closure, the Kennedy Center’s finances, the push to bolt Trump’s name onto the facade, and the possibility of demolition. The Justice Department is screaming "fishing expedition" and separation of powers, while simultaneously insisting that anything involving Trump or White House staff is just too sacred to be discussed — even though this is about his actions as board chair of a congressionally created institution funded with public money. Presidential duties now apparently include picking out fonts for the marquee and reviewing "Kennedy Center Demolished" placards on Air Force One.
A federal judge has already blocked the closure and ordered Trump’s name stripped from the exterior, but the administration is still using a blanket "protective" privilege claim to shut down deposition questions and document requests about what Trump told Kennedy Center staff to do. Beatty’s lawyers call it an unprecedented abuse of privilege; DOJ calls it Tuesday. The presidency was once about safeguarding democracy and the Constitution. Under Trump, it’s about shielding his conversations on how best to gut a national cultural landmark and staple his brand over a dead president’s memorial.
Apparently America has reached the "screaming into a pillow" phase of the Trump sequel. Multiple new polls say nearly two-thirds of the country thinks the economy is bad, seven in ten think the country is out of control, and eight in ten want either "substantial change" or "complete and total upheaval" in how the country is run. So, mission accomplished for President Chaos: he promised to shake things up, and now everyone’s shaken like a car with three lug nuts.
Trump’s approval on inflation has plummeted to a majestic 22%, which is only slightly higher than the approval rating of food poisoning. His overall job approval sits at 36%, a new low for either term, driven down by young voters, low-income voters, non-white voters, and people without college degrees — you know, the folks he keeps insisting love him. The White House, naturally, had no immediate comment, presumably because "Have you tried not looking at the polls?" isn’t a great communications strategy.
Democrats, for their part, are somehow managing to underwhelm in a political environment where voters are actively asking for "complete and total upheaval" and already living under a president who governs like a flaming roulette wheel. Polls show more people are pessimistic than optimistic about both parties’ futures, though Democrats hold a growing lead in the House generic ballot and are gaining ground on traditionally Republican issues like inflation and foreign policy — a strong sign that the GOP brand has achieved the rare feat of being less trusted on the economy than the party that actually says government should do things.
Republicans know they’re on defense, yanking ads in doomed races and carpet-bombing once-safe states just to hang on. Democrats, meanwhile, face the delicious prospect of winning only to be greeted by a fresh crop of internal rebels who might prefer burning the party playbook to reading it. Pollsters politely remind everyone they’re not clairvoyant, so we’ll have to wait until after the midterms to see whether Americans’ discontent becomes a real upheaval or just another deeply felt, statistically significant sigh.
Trump personally rushed out a statement to Politico to declare that reports his White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is on the chopping block are "TOTAL FAKE NEWS," which is how you know someone definitely passed him a burn book thicker than the federal register. After reportedly soliciting allies’ opinions on Wiles and hearing a chorus of knives sharpening behind her back, the president now insists everything is wonderful and no one should read anything into all the leaking, scheming, and public denial.
So the West Wing remains what it always is under Trump: a reality show set where senior staff serve at the pleasure of the last person who trashed them in his ear, and job security is measured in half-lives of bad press. Instead of a functioning executive branch, we get a court drama where the king periodically announces that his favorite adviser is absolutely not about to be fed to the crocodiles, while the moat guy quietly warms up the water.
Ukraine’s Starlink and Starshield access — the stuff keeping them from getting steamrolled by Russia — suddenly gets throttled, then magically restored, while nobody in the Trump administration can say whether the commander-in-chief tried to turn off a battlefield in the middle of a war. Totally normal that a U.S. ally fighting for survival has to guess whether the president or Elon Musk flipped the off switch on their war-critical internet.
Meanwhile, Trump lifts sanctions on Russian oil, hands Putin a financial lifeline, then demands Ukraine stop hitting Russian refineries because apparently the only energy infrastructure that deserves protection is the stuff funding Moscow’s invasion. Zelensky calls it “a weak decision” and “a gift to Putin,” so Trump responds like a true statesman and tells Ukraine to go elect a new president. Diplomatic genius: threaten regime change in the country that’s actually fighting the dictator you keep doing favors for.
Trump then unilaterally announces a “ceasefire” that Ukraine didn’t agree to, Russia keeps bombing Ukrainian energy infrastructure anyway, and Kyiv responds by resuming strikes on Russian refineries — because they live in reality, not inside Trump’s Fox News fan fiction. U.S. officials are reportedly “unlikely to look kindly” on Ukraine defending itself, but they seem perfectly chill with a world where American space platforms and a bored tech billionaire can throttle an ally’s war effort on a whim.
So we now have foreign policy where Putin gets sanctions relief, Ukraine gets gaslit about phantom ceasefires, and the fog of war is brought to you by SpaceX bandwidth management. The Trump White House can’t say if the president tried to sabotage Ukraine’s satellites, but they’re very sure the real problem is Zelensky not being deferential enough to the guy who just helped Russia sell more oil.
Healthcare.gov: where the coverage is affordable, the interface is clunky, and the Trump administration might delete your insurance if you don't pick up spam calls.
The Trump administration proudly announced it had heroically saved taxpayers by kicking 760,000 people off ACA plans through a big "anti-fraud" sweep on Healthcare.gov. Then a funny thing happened: insurers started quietly putting some of those people back, because it turns out not everyone was a "phantom" enrollment conjured up by shadowy brokers. Some were just regular humans who made the mistake of missing a letter or not answering a phone call from a number they didn’t recognize. Truly, the stuff of criminal masterminds.
Supporters like Brian Blase and his Paragon Health Institute — a sort of think tank for people who wake up angry that poor people can see a doctor — are calling this crackdown "long overdue," based on their own controversial research that just happens to support gutting ACA coverage. Meanwhile, CMS is already onto Phase Two, scrutinizing another 419,000 sign-ups, with insurers asked to report back on how many people they can’t get ahold of sometime "around mid-to-late November, after the midterm elections." What a wild coincidence in timing, surely nothing to see there.
The administration, naturally, is saying as little as possible about how many people were wrongly dropped, how hard they tried to contact them, or how fast they’re fixing their mistakes. Health law expert Katie Keith notes that yes, some enrollments might be improper — and also yes, a whole lot of people may have been "lost in the shuffle" and stripped of coverage for no good reason. The lack of transparency, she says, is "telling." When your anti-fraud crusade starts looking like a mass purge of legitimate coverage and your main fix is "call us back and beg," what you’re really cutting is not fraud — it’s access to health care.
Sonesta Chicago O’Hare: where the pillows are firm, the Wi-Fi is spotty, and the room might secretly be a for-profit ICE holding cell.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin bragged that ICE isn’t running "Holiday Inns" and, for once, he nailed it: according to a new lawsuit, they outsourced the job to Sonesta and a $1.3 billion contractor to run off-the-books detention out of an airport hotel. Asylum-seeker Valentina Galvis and her then seven-month-old U.S. citizen baby were allegedly locked for five days in a Sonesta Chicago O’Hare room by ICE contractor MVM Inc., with no way to contact the outside world, no idea what would happen to them, and periodic threats that they’d be shipped to Texas or deported to Colombia.
The suit says MVM "physically seized, transported, and confined" Galvis and her son while Sonesta "knowingly provided and maintained" the room as a makeshift cell — a tidy little corporate partnership where the product is trauma and the revenue stream is federal contracts. The baby allegedly got nutritionally inadequate food, ill-fitting clothes, and no laundry access while his mother’s milk production dropped from stress; she washed his tiny outfits in the bathroom sink and dried them by the AC while he sat in just a diaper. All this because DHS grabbed them at an immigration court, then a federal judge had to order that they not be removed from Illinois, which is what passes for guardrails in this system.
MVM (over $1.3 billion in ICE contracts since 2020), Sonesta, and the named executives are all suddenly very shy, declining to comment while insisting in earlier statements that they "do not condone illegal behavior" — they just allegedly profit from it. Meanwhile, Galvis now has PTSD, avoids going outside, and still faces possible deportation, because nothing says "land of the free" like being illegally arrested, secretly jailed in a hotel, permanently traumatized, and then told your asylum claim is still pending. We’re not providing Holiday Inns, Mullin said. Right — the Holiday Inn would at least give you a working phone and clean clothes.
Barack Obama calmly explaining that propaganda destroys democracies while half the political class is busy testing that theory in real time.
Barack Obama popped up in Glasgow to remind everyone that when social media first took off, he naively thought it would be a tool for democratic engagement and human rights, not a 24/7 brain-poison dispenser for racists, authoritarians, and guys with eagle avatars screaming about "globalists." He notes that the same tech that can organize a protest can also supercharge hate groups, because the reptile part of our brains really enjoys being bathed in rage, fear, and conspiracy theories. Silicon Valley calls that "engagement."
Instead of pretending history started in 2016, Obama helpfully points out that after World War II, the US and Europe knew propaganda and big lies could turn entire societies into monsters, so governments actually set rules and held people responsible. Then, somewhere between the Fairness Doctrine dying and Facebook inventing the angry emoji, we collectively decided: "Eh, let's not do that anymore." As he puts it: "We have not chosen to do that"—a very polite way of saying political leaders looked at rising extremism, shrugged, and chose donor checks over democracy.
He also gently drags the "it's just jokes" crowd, noting that when politicians normalize language that scapegoats immigrants, Jews, Black people, and LGBTQ folks as punchlines, it doesn't stay "edgy" banter—it becomes the on-ramp to dehumanization and, historically, much worse. But Obama, ever the designated Optimist-in-Chief of a world on fire, still insists that drifting into extremism isn't inevitable, just the path we keep choosing while everyone in power pretends it's all very mysterious and complicated.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, freshly upgraded from Trump rally hype-woman to alleged walking FARA violation, practices the ancient art of diplomacy: smiling for the cameras while the AmEx bill waits in the other room.
Donald Trump has finally answered the age‑old question: what if the State Department were less a diplomatic corps and more a loyalty rewards program? The second-term ambassador list reads like a casting call for a reality show called America’s Next Top Conflict of Interest: ex‑fiancées, pardoned felons, donors, and random cronies all shipped abroad to represent the United States, so long as they’re willing to treat foreign policy like a Fox News hit and a side hustle.
Kimberly Guilfoyle landed in Athens right after her engagement to Don Jr ended, proving that in Trumpworld, every breakup comes with consolation prizes and security briefings. She then allegedly spent her tenure promoting a favored Greek construction and energy company, letting lobbyists sit in on official diplomatic meetings, and asking an ally to quietly wipe out her $100,000 AmEx tab before her Senate hearing. So yes, we now have documented evidence that Trump ambassadors are literally using their posts like a high-limit credit card.
Over in Paris, Charles Kushner – pardoned by Trump after convictions for tax evasion, false FEC statements, and witness tampering – is now the face of America in France and Monaco. He managed to get himself banned from meetings with French ministers after blowing off a formal summons about his public rant that France was letting antisemitism and leftist extremism run wild. The French wanted diplomacy; they got a Fox & Friends monologue in a suit, stapled to a criminal record and a presidential pardon.
This isn’t normal political patronage; this is dynastic customer service. Ambassadorships are less about representing the American people and more about rewarding the Trump inner circle and turning embassies into family franchises. The message to the world is clear: US foreign policy is now brought to you by the same people who thought “pardoning your in‑laws and sending them to Paris” was a governance strategy.
State Department officials workshop ad copy for their new refugee campaign: "Tired of living in a democracy that won’t validate your white victim complex? Try America."
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in immigration policy: spending $335,000 of taxpayer money to figure out why white South African Afrikaners aren’t stampeding into the US refugee program he specially rigged for them. After slashing the refugee cap from Biden’s 125,000 down to 7,500, then grudgingly bumping it to 17,500, Trump has managed to admit 16,292 refugees this year—almost all of them white South Africans, with a token five Afghans tossed in like garnish. The problem? Even the supposed victims of "white genocide" don’t seem desperate to flee the alleged racial apocalypse the White House keeps inventing on Truth Social.
This whole sideshow comes from Trump’s 2025 executive order that froze the broader refugee program while putting Afrikaner resettlement first, on the grounds that South Africa is persecuting white farmers and is too mean to Israel. South Africa, its foreign minister, and basically every credible expert have pointed out there’s "no evidence" of genocide, but don’t worry: the US is forging ahead with focus groups in places like Orania—the whites-only separatist town you’d get if Fox News built a gated community—to test which messages best sell America as a safe space for aggrieved Boers.
Meanwhile, the State Department has been quietly shoveling $176.9m from its Human Rights and Democracy Fund into 43 rightwing pet projects abroad, including a $1m grant for "advancing white Afrikaner rights"—no recipient named, but JD Vance and Stephen Miller have reportedly been personally lobbying on this stuff, so what could possibly go wrong. Aid to South Africa has been cut, visas restricted, and the country has been uninvited from the G20 over its land policies and its inconvenient habit of accusing Israel of genocide rather than Hamas. Trump’s public response to South African jurist and Nobel peace prize winner Navi Pillay: he’s "never heard of her," but he knows the peace prize should have gone to "ME."
So the US refugee program, once a lifeline for people fleeing war and persecution, is now a boutique white-identity project with a marketing budget and a focus-group schedule. The administration is turning humanitarian law into a racial loyalty program, and the only hitch in the plan is that the supposed target audience doesn’t seem nearly as terrified of Black people as the White House needs them to be.
Trump, mid-rant, discovering that suing the BBC is not the same thing as scaring CBS executives in a conference room with bad coffee.
Donald Trump has launched a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC over a badly edited Panorama segment that falsely suggested he directly called for violence on January 6. The BBC admitted the screw-up and apologised — and then, in a plot twist unfamiliar to US networks, decided to fight instead of cutting Trump a giant hush check and canceling a comedian.
While ABC, CBS and others have been busy perfecting the art of corporate genuflection — ABC handing Trump $15m, CBS axing Colbert right after settling another suit, and Jimmy Kimmel getting an FCC licence review as a presidential party favor — the BBC is doing something deeply un-American: treating a bullying lawsuit from a sitting president as a challenge, not a business expense. A judge just cleared the Beeb to serve legal papers on Don Jr and Ivanka, while the corporation is still pushing to force Trump to show up for his own deposition, which he is, naturally, trying to dodge.
Trump is used to a media landscape where Brendan Carr’s Trump-loyalist FCC can rattle broadcast licences to discipline late-night jokes. What he’s run into instead is a publicly funded broadcaster powered by underpaid, furious, “bitterly loyal” employees who will cheerfully wear a hair shirt on air for their own mistakes but will not roll over for his. The man who thought he was the apex predator of media intimidation has finally met something scarier than a ratings slide: a weird, stubborn British institution that once helped stare down actual Nazis and is now treating his tantrum like just another storm in the Shipping Forecast.
Greg Abbott peers at a nearly empty border and bravely declares it a catastrophe, then remembers to renew the disaster powers before lunch.
Greg Abbott has apparently decided that if you just call it a disaster long enough, you become king of Texas by default. Despite the Trump administration bragging about “historic lows” in border crossings and apprehensions dropping from 180,000 a month under Biden to about 8,000 now, Abbott keeps renewing his border security “disaster” — 69 times, including 21 renewals under Trump. The emergency may have faded, but the emergency powers? Those are doing great.
The proclamation lets Abbott bypass the allegedly “weak governor” constitution Texans thought they had, and instead rule by executive order: shifting money without pesky legislators, suspending regulations, and handing out no-bid contracts like party favors. Since January 2025, the Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department have tossed over $5 million in noncompetitive contracts at things like a Ford F-150, rifles, and apartments, all under the magic word emergency. One gun company alone scored more than $2 million for rifles and pistols under Operation Lone Star’s endless crisis cosplay.
Lawmakers from both parties keep trying to rein this in, and Abbott keeps patting them on the head and renewing the disaster anyway. Operation Lone Star has now burned through more than $11 billion during Biden plus another $3 billion under Trump, while Abbott’s own office gets hundreds of millions to spray around via grants to prosecutors and local agencies. Border crossings fall, drought declarations shrink, but this one emergency never dies — because it’s not about the border, it’s about power and contracts. The cartels may be a problem, but the governor has clearly found his favorite trafficking route: public money to friendly vendors, smuggled through a permanent state of exception.
The Department of Justice — formerly known as that place where laws live — is now moonlighting as Trump’s opposition research firm, quietly probing Gavin Newsom, his wife, and their foundation while everyone pretends this is normal governance and not a banana republic audition tape. Newsom says federal agents have been knocking on doors of family friends and former employees, because nothing screams "rule of law" like sending investigators to rummage through the lives of your likely general-election opponent.
What’s happened in the nearly four months since Newsom went public? A whole lot of mystery, which is Washington-speak for "we’re absolutely using the machinery of the state for politics, but we’d rather not put that in writing." The investigation just hangs there — not charged, not cleared, just weaponized ambiguity — while Trump gets to campaign on ominous insinuations about "corruption" he personally ordered the government to go look for. It’s less "drain the swamp" and more "turn the swamp into a private security force".
So we now have the sitting president aiming the DOJ at a rival governor’s family and charity, then letting the cloud of accusation do the work while the legal process moves at the speed of molasses in January. That’s not law enforcement; that’s state power as a smear machine. But sure, tell us again how the real threat to democracy is college kids being mean on TikTok.
The kids are not alright — they’re just statistically eliminated. A record wave of Gen Z and millennial hopefuls filed to run for Congress, and then the American political system did what it does best: quietly feed them into a woodchipper built out of filing fees, donor lists, and party gatekeepers. Roughly seven in ten younger candidates were gone by early September, because nothing says "representative democracy" like a legislature where incumbents average 59 and treat retirement like a constitutional violation.
Turns out if you’re under 40 and think you can fix anything, the parties have a message: get in line, wait 30 years, and maybe we’ll let you chair a subcommittee on postal reform. Only 21.2% of Gen Z candidates even made it past the early stages, while Boomers floated serenely through on a raft made of name recognition and corporate checks. Nearly a third of Gen Z candidates couldn’t even qualify for the primary ballot — a fun little reminder that our much-celebrated "youth wave" mostly crashes on the breakwater of paperwork and pay-to-play politics.
Women are still underrepresented among Gen Z candidates, younger men are washing out at even higher rates, and most of the youth energy is on the Democratic side — which the Trump GOP is somehow both losing and pandering to, while clinging to its favorite demographic: people old enough to remember when leaded gasoline was a lifestyle. A couple of 29-year-olds did break through — a democratic socialist in Denver and a young Republican in Iowa — but they’re the exceptions trotted out to prove the system works, even as the numbers scream that it mostly works for donors, incumbents, and the same aging political class that brought us Trump and then decided they definitely deserve another decade in charge.
