america holds a funeral, trump holds a tantrum
Three ex-presidents attend a funeral and still manage to show more respect for democracy than the guy actually in office.
Chicago hosted something Washington hasn’t seen in a while: three former presidents in the same room talking about protecting democracy instead of stress-testing how much of it can be shredded by executive order. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Bill Clinton gathered with thousands to honor civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, while Obama gently noted that "each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions" — a line so clearly about Trump that you could almost hear the Truth Social posts drafting themselves.
The service doubled as a reminder that there was once a time when "reverend" meant marching with Martin Luther King Jr, organizing for voting rights, and founding Rainbow PUSH, rather than livestreaming from a gold-plated golf club about how the Constitution is being mean. Clinton reminisced about Jackson standing by him during impeachment, Biden praised his tenacity, and Jennifer Hudson sang — a full tableau of people who, whatever their flaws, at least pretend democracy matters.
Meanwhile, the current occupant of the White House was present only as a ghost in Obama’s speech: an unnamed, lumbering threat to the institutions Jackson spent a lifetime trying to strengthen. America buried a civil rights legend while its sitting president kept proving why those rights and those institutions still need defending from the guy who’s supposed to be guarding them.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s anti-vax clown car loses a wheel. again.
FDA headquarters, where vaccine policy is decided by a fight between biotech lobbyists and Trump’s in-house anti-vax evangelist.
The Trump administration’s vaccine chief, Dr Vinay Prasad, is being launched out of the FDA for the second time in under a year, which is what passes for a stable regulatory environment in Trumpworld. FDA commissioner Marty Makary told staff that Prasad will "return" to his academic job at UCSF, a polite way of saying: congratulations, you’ve been promoted back to a real institution.
Prasad’s brief career as vaccine czar has been one long collision between science, biotech lobbying, and the Trump–RFK Jr anti-vax fanfiction universe. He helped Makary push faster, easier drug reviews for companies, then turned around and slapped extra warnings and study requirements on some biotech drugs and, of course, Covid vaccines — the sacred hate-totem of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who spent years attacking vaccines before being put in charge of, checks notes, national health policy.
Last July, Prasad was already forced out once after annoying biotech execs, patient groups, and Trump’s conservative allies, only to be yanked back into the building less than two weeks later with RFK Jr and Makary riding to his rescue. Now he’s out again, leaving behind an FDA where drug approvals are simultaneously sped up for industry and politically kneecapped for vaccines. Regulatory science has been replaced with a choose-your-own-adventure written by lobbyists and anti-vaxxers, and the punchline is public health.
#anti-science#healthcare#killing-democracy
trump turns the kennedy center into a hostage situation
The Kennedy Center, seen here moments before being rebranded as the Trump Memorial Anti-Woke Entertainment Complex.
Jean Davidson, executive director of the National Symphony Orchestra, has decided that maybe she doesn’t need to stick around and watch Donald Trump convert the Kennedy Center into a monument to his ego and victim complex, so she’s heading back to Los Angeles. She politely cites “external forces” beyond her control, which is a very diplomatic way of saying: this place is now run by Richard Grenell and a Trump-loyalist board trying to staple Dear Leader’s name onto everything that doesn’t move fast enough.
Trump, who barely noticed the Kennedy Center his first term, has now decided the country’s flagship performing arts venue is a front in his war on “woke” culture. He ousted the old leadership, installed a hand-picked board that promptly tried to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center—a move legal scholars keep pointing out requires Congress, not a fan club. Artists like Renée Fleming, Philip Glass, and Béla Fleck are canceling, the Washington National Opera has packed up after decades, and Trump is now threatening to close the whole place for a two-year “construction” shutdown. So yes, America’s national arts center is being slowly converted into a culture-war demolition site, because nothing says “strong democracy” like the president trying to rebrand the Kennedy Center as his personal casino lobby.
#killing-democracy#fascism
gotta grift ’em all: white house turns pikachu into state propaganda
Beloved children’s mascot Pikachu, moments before being conscripted into unpaid service for the world’s thirstiest propaganda department.
The Trump White House has apparently decided that if you’re going to run an authoritarian meme regime, you might as well drag Pikachu down with you. The administration posted an official meme using Pokémon imagery and a mini Pikachu to sell "Make America Great Again," prompting Pokémon Company International to clarify that no, actually, they did not sign up to be the cutesy mascot of ethnic cleansing and endless culture war. Spokeswoman Sravanthi Dev stressed that the brand’s mission is to bring people together, which is a bold contrast to an administration whose mission is to bring people together at ICE facilities.
This isn’t even their first offense. The same 30-year-old franchise already had to slap the Trump team’s hand for using the "Gotta catch ’em all" slogan over footage of border patrol arrests, because nothing says "family entertainment" like turning a deportation dragnet into a marketing crossover event. Now they’re apparently ripping art from the new game Pokopia, complete with MAGA text in a similar font, because why pay for ad creatives when you can just loot Nintendo like it’s a federal disaster fund?
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson proudly calls this "engaging posts and banger memes" that communicate Trump’s "extremely popular agenda"—which currently includes splicing war footage from Iran with stolen Call of Duty clips on official channels. Artists, comedians, and even Trump-friendly podcaster Theo Von are publicly telling DHS and the White House to stop using their work for deportation propaganda unless they’re going to, at minimum, cut a check. The administration, predictably, seems to believe that intellectual property law—like ethics rules, subpoenas, and international norms—only applies to other people.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
white house justice promo stars corrupt lawyer, meth kingpin, foreign freedom fighter
The White House communications team, moments before discovering that Breaking Bad is not actually a documentary about responsible governance.
The Trump White House has released a 42-second Hollywood-themed "justice the American way" hype reel for its Iran policy, and it’s basically a fan cam made by a 14-year-old who just discovered torrenting. The official @WhiteHouse account stitched together clips of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, Russell Crowe’s Gladiator, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, Tom Cruise’s Top Gun fighter jock, Keanu Reeves’ John Wick, and—why not—Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, the corrupt lawyer who helps a meth manufacturer build an empire. Nothing says "rule of law" like centering your justice message around a cocaine buffet of war movies and a guy who launders drug money.
It keeps getting more on-brand. The video also features Bryan Cranston’s Walter White growling "I AM the danger!"—a line from a series about a suburban dad who becomes a mass-murdering meth kingpin—and then caps it all off with a "flawless victory" from Mortal Kombat stamped over "The White House." So the administration’s official messaging on Iran is: we’re a vengeful video game boss, advised by a crooked lawyer, spiritually guided by a Canadian assassin, and visually curated with footage from actors who publicly despise Trump. It’s less "American justice" and more "Discord mod gets access to the nuclear codes."
As a bonus, the whole thing may be built on yet another round of copyright roulette. The White House won’t say whether it cleared any of these clips, which would track with its long tradition of using songs and images from artists like Beyoncé, Springsteen, ABBA, and the Rolling Stones until the lawyers show up with cease-and-desist letters. This is the same operation that digitally altered a protest photo to make a woman look like she was crying, and that proudly embraces AI "slopaganda"—including a video of Trump literally dumping feces on protesters. The message is clear: the law is something you broadcast about in Marvel fonts, not something you follow.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump’s illegal tariffs come with a $175,000,000,000 refund policy
Trump studies a customs form, confidently declares himself World Tariff Emperor, accidentally invents a $175bn refund program.
A US trade judge is now holding the world’s least-fun raffle: deciding how to refund up to $175bn in Trump’s illegally collected tariffs to more than 300,000 importers. The Supreme Court already ruled that Trump’s so‑called "liberation day" tariffs weren’t actually liberated from the law, just from any statutory basis whatsoever. Turns out a 1977 emergency law doesn’t let you just slap global tariffs on everything because you woke up mad at the trade deficit.
Judge Richard Eaton has politely informed Customs and Border Protection that yes, they will be giving the money back, and yes, they already have a system to do it, and no, it doesn’t require a four‑year study or a blockchain. CBP "liquidates" entries and issues refunds every day; now they just have to do it for hundreds of billions of dollars they vacuumed up for Trump’s vanity trade war. One test case, Atmus Filtration, alone paid about $11m in illegal tariffs, and could end up being the template for unwinding as many as 2,000 other lawsuits.
While the courts are busy calculating interest on Trump’s unlawful tax hike, the White House is speed‑running the sequel: a brand‑new 15% tariff on all imports under a different law, because learning from constitutional faceplants is for losers. Twenty‑four Democratic attorneys general and governors, led by New York’s Letitia James, are now suing over this fresh attempt to unilaterally jack up consumer prices. As James put it, Trump is once again ignoring the law and the Constitution to effectively raise taxes on Americans. The administration keeps calling it tough trade policy; the courts keep calling it what it is: illegal.
#lawlessness#trade-war
trump breaks the job market, hasn’t even finished breaking iran yet
A lonely "Now Hiring" sign, patiently waiting for the part of the Trump war cycle where the economy magically improves through sheer presidential yelling at the Fed.
The US shed 92,000 jobs in February, right before Donald Trump decided the global economy needed an extra thrill ride via a US-Israel conflict with Iran. Unemployment ticked up to 4.4%, economists were expecting gains, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics quietly confirmed that 2025 was the weakest year for job growth since Covid. So yes, we’ve now reached the "Make America 2020 Again" phase of the Trump sequel.
Job growth in 2025 was basically a first-half-only special, with the back half of the year losing 45,000 jobs even before the new war cosplay. Now the Fed has to decide in mid-March whether to keep rates steady while inflation still lurks, or cave to Trump, who has been aggressively pushing for cuts so the economy looks less like his Twitter feed and more like a campaign ad. Federal Reserve officials, like Cleveland Fed president Beth Hammack, are signaling an extended pause, which is adorable given that the president treats independent monetary policy like a customer service line he can yell at until a manager appears.
The February report doesn’t yet capture the "fun" knock-on effects of Trump escalating in Iran, but it’s already clear the labor market was wobbling before the bombs. So naturally, instead of focusing on stabilizing jobs, the White House is busy shaking the global economy like a vending machine and demanding cheaper money on top. Who could have guessed that permanent crisis governance isn’t great for employment?
#money#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump discovers the enemy within: americans existing in public
An MRAP idling in a quiet American town, bravely protecting residents from the imminent threat of a strongly worded protest sign.
America’s celebrating 250 years of independence by turning Main Street into Fallujah with better branding. Donald Trump has spent the past year shipping Pentagon castoffs and DHS toys to ICE, the National Guard, and every jumpy police department that can spell “terrorism grant.” Predator drones, flash-bang grenades, armored personnel carriers, MRAPs in towns that barely have a stoplight – all the comforts of a forever war, now available curbside in suburban Ohio.
Trump’s White House helpfully rebranded public dissent as an “
enemy within,” which really streamlines things: if everyone who complains is basically a terrorist, you don’t need to bother with that messy First Amendment stuff. Local governments are being muscled into “coordination” with federal armed forces, because nothing says
free society like MRAPs parked next to the farmers’ market and weaponized drones watching the protest you were technically allowed to hold.
Congress, having created the 1033 Program that turned the Pentagon’s junk drawer into your local sheriff’s personal war chest, is now being politely asked to maybe stop handing out grenade launchers, long-range acoustic devices, and weaponized drones to people whose biggest local threat used to be raccoons in the dumpster. Rep. Hank Johnson is reintroducing the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, which would block the worst of the hardware and try to walk back the whole “Americans are enemy combatants” aesthetic.
The founders worried about standing armies; they probably didn’t imagine the HOA president getting rolled on by an MRAP.
#killing-democracy#fascism
cuban elf upgrades embargo from 'cruel' to 'medieval siege'
Marco Rubio explains how cutting off fuel, food and medicine to 11 million people is actually a bold stand for 'freedom,' as Trump roleplays 1960s Cold War villain on hard mode.
Trump has apparently decided that the 60-year embargo on Cuba just wasn’t quite murderous enough, so on 29 January he declared the island an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to US national security and slapped on a full fuel blockade. Hospitals, schools, homes? Lights out. Food and medicine? Optional. Human rights? Adorable concept. And there’s Marco Rubio at State, proudly insisting this is all for "freedom" while helping starve the very people he claims to liberate.
For decades, the US has pretended the embargo was a minor inconvenience while secretly writing cables about making life so unbearable that Cubans would overthrow their own government. Trump, never one for subtext, has simply said the quiet part into a hot mic: "There’s an embargo. There’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything" — said with all the nuance of a landlord turning off the heat in January. Meanwhile, a Florida-registered speedboat stuffed with rifles and Molotov cocktails just got intercepted off Cuba’s coast, because when Washington cranks up the pressure, some exiles hear it as an invitation to LARP Bay of Pigs 2.0.
The piece also notes something the administration would rather you ignore: younger Cuban Americans are organizing against this carnival of cruelty, demanding engagement instead of siege warfare conducted from Air Force One. They’re treating their heritage as something other than a prop for Rubio’s career and Trump’s imperial cosplay, insisting that "freedom" shouldn’t require your grandma to choose between insulin and candles. The choice on offer is clear: diplomacy and basic dignity, or an endless, bipartisan tradition of slowly strangling a neighboring country and calling it "democracy promotion".
#imperialism#killing-democracy
trump restores 'diplomacy' with the country he just bombed and looted
US officials smile for the cameras in Caracas while quietly measuring Venezuela for new pipelines, mine shafts, and a convenient democracy costume.
The Trump administration is very proudly announcing that the US and Venezuela are "restoring diplomatic ties" — which is a poetic way of saying: after bombing Caracas, killing around 100 people, snatching Nicolás Maduro and his wife off to New York for a drug trial, Washington is now ready to cash in. The State Department issued the usual soothing word salad about "stability", "economic recovery" and a "peaceful transition" to democracy, while quietly skipping the part where the transition was jump‑started by US airstrikes.
Doug Burgum — interior secretary and proud chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, which is definitely not the name of a Bond villain committee — just wrapped up a two-day trip to Caracas. He reports that interim president Delcy Rodríguez, conveniently elevated with Trump's blessing, is very eager to guarantee "security" for foreign mining companies and to open up the Orinoco Mining Arc, a region already crawling with armed groups. Washington now openly claims it "in effect runs Venezuela" and controls its vast natural resources, as long as Rodríguez keeps signing the right paperwork and rewriting oil and mining laws to let US firms strip-mine the place.
Energy secretary Chris Wright was there earlier to demand a "dramatic increase" in oil production and to rave about "tremendous opportunities" — for whom, he did not need to specify. Between the bombing raid, the regime change, the trial spectacle in New York, and the rush to lock in oil, gold, diamonds, and rare minerals, this isn't foreign policy so much as a live‑action corporate acquisition. Call it what it is: resource extraction with some consulates stapled on.
#imperialism#forever-grifting
doj ‘oopsies’ its way into releasing trump-epstein interview files
Attorney General Pam Bondi explains that crucial Epstein-Trump interview files were hiding in the DOJ’s very tall, very classy, totally duplicative filing cabinet.
The Justice Department has miraculously "discovered" 15 Epstein-related documents that were totally just mis-labeled as duplicates, among them FBI interview notes from a South Carolina woman who says Jeffrey Epstein abused her and that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was between 13 and 15. For years, this material somehow failed to exist on the DOJ website, then popped back into reality once reporters compared the public releases to the evidence catalog from the Ghislaine Maxwell case. Government transparency, brought to you by Ctrl+Z.
These newly posted summaries detail how the woman says Epstein blackmailed her mother, trafficked her to New York or New Jersey, and delivered her to a "very tall building with huge rooms" where she alleges Trump assaulted her. The FBI interviewed her multiple times in 2019, decided the claims were important enough to keep talking to her, and then — as far as the documents show — just kind of vibed from there. The files are silent on whether agents found her credible or bothered to verify anything, but DOJ is very loud about insisting such claims are "unfounded and false" and would have been "weaponized" already if they had even "a shred of credibility." Always reassuring when the nation's top law enforcement shop sounds like Trump's Truth Social account.
Meanwhile, DOJ yanked 47,635 Epstein files offline for "victim concerns" and redactions, then swore on X that "ALL responsive documents" had been produced except for a few narrow categories. That statement aged like milk once NBC News and Rep. Robert Garcia noticed that some of the most politically sensitive files — including these Trump-related interviews — weren’t in the supposedly unredacted collection for Congress. Now, under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, DOJ is legally barred from hiding things just because they’re embarrassing to a "government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary," so the department has graciously agreed to let members of Congress read the "duplicates" in a special reading room, like a shame library for elite impunity.
The Republican-led House Oversight Committee just voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi over the whole mess, while Garcia is out here promising to end the "White House cover-up." So we have a sex-trafficking scandal, a former president named by an alleged victim, a DOJ that keeps discovering its own missing files like they fell behind the couch, and a transparency law that has to explicitly say, "you are not allowed to hide this just because it’s politically awkward." Truly, the system is working flawlessly.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump tries to bully spain into his next great middle east disaster
José María Aznar and George W Bush in 2003, back when Spain’s role was to smile for the camera and sign up for the wrong war on cue.
Donald Trump has decided the best way to manage global security is to threaten a NATO ally with a trade cutoff because Spain won’t let him use two shared bases in Andalucía to bomb Iran on demand. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez responded with a 10-minute televised statement that, translated from diplomatic Spanish, basically said: we’re not going to help a failing leader start a war to distract from his incompetence and enrich his friends. He even spelled it out: governments should protect citizens, not "use the smokescreen of war" to hide their failures while funneling cash to the usual weapons profiteers. Subtlety is dead, and Trump killed it with a JDAM.
Spain’s far right, naturally, rushed to defend Dear Leader in Washington. Vox’s Santiago Abascal blamed "ayatollahs" and accused Sánchez of clinging to power, while the conservative People’s Party scolded him for endangering the sacred transatlantic tradition of doing whatever the US president wants, no matter how reckless. Meanwhile, Sánchez keeps committing the unforgivable sin of the Trump era: saying out loud that endless war, regime change, and starving civilians might not be the high point of Western values. He’s slammed Israel’s devastation of Gaza, criticised the US-backed toppling of Maduro, and even defended immigration instead of campaigning on barbed wire and panic.
Across Europe, most leaders are bravely confronting Trump’s tantrums by issuing carefully worded statements to their press offices and then doing absolutely nothing. Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen has at least made noise over Trump trying to slap his name on Greenland like it’s a condo tower, but when it comes to openly telling the US president no on using European soil as a launchpad, Sánchez is basically the only one reading the fine print on the "rules-based international order" brochure. Trump is weaponizing trade and military basing rights to strong-arm allies into his next foreign policy catastrophe, and Europe’s big capitals are mostly responding with a group shrug and a nervous glance at their export numbers.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
trump takes on big tylenol, pregnant women lose
President Trump, flanked by RFK Jr. and Mehmet Oz, announces that Tylenol is canceled and the new Surgeon General is a YouTube comment section.
President Donald Trump looked at decades of obstetric research and said: "No thanks, I’ll go with vibes." At a Sept. 22 press conference, he told pregnant women to "fight like hell" not to take Tylenol and declared the FDA would warn doctors about a supposed autism risk that robust evidence does not support. The actual FDA letter called the topic an "ongoing area of scientific debate," and a major analysis has since found no link between Tylenol in pregnancy and autism. But Trump’s medical degree from Facebook University was already issued, so here we are.
Researchers from Harvard and Brown then checked what happens when the president freelances as your OB-GYN. Using ER records, they found Tylenol (paracetamol) orders for pregnant patients dropped 10% after Trump’s comments, while non-pregnant women’s orders didn’t budge. One of the few pain and fever meds ACOG says is actually safe in pregnancy suddenly became suspect, in a population where untreated fever itself increases the risk of birth defects. So the self-proclaimed pro-life movement is now… encouraging pregnant women to white-knuckle high fevers because Donald Trump and RFK Jr. got bored one afternoon.
While he was scaring pregnant women off a safe drug, Trump was also upselling leucovorin, a chemotherapy-adjacent folate drug he hyped as an autism treatment. New leucovorin prescriptions for kids 5–17 jumped 71% after his little infomercial, despite the American Academy of Pediatrics saying the evidence is nowhere near ready for prime time. It’s typically used with cancer patients and for a rare condition called cerebral folate deficiency, but sure, let’s toss it at autistic kids because the president heard about a couple of small overseas trials. Evidence-based medicine is for losers; real patriots chase unproven cures while making proven ones politically radioactive.
So the administration’s health policy continues its core philosophy: ignore experts, terrify vulnerable people, juice demand for speculative treatments, and call it freedom. Pregnant women are now stuck choosing between a fever that can harm their baby and defying the president’s medical fan fiction. Meanwhile, the FDA is left updating labels and cleaning up the mess from yet another Trump press conference that turned into a live-action experiment in how fast you can erode public trust in science.
#anti-science#healthcare#killing-democracy
florida woman cosplays u.s. attorney, bar notices
Lindsey Halligan, seen here auditioning for the role of U.S. Attorney without reading the part where you actually have to be one.
Lindsey Halligan, the Trump-loyalist insurance lawyer who somehow speed-ran her way into pretending to be the top federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia, is now under investigation by the Florida Bar. The nonprofit watchdog Campaign for Accountability says she falsely claimed to be a U.S. attorney while pushing doomed prosecutions of James Comey and New York AG Letitia James — and, shockingly, the legal profession has some notes about that.
Two separate federal judges — including one appointed by Trump himself, because poetic comedy is not dead — found that Halligan operated without legal authority. One said she openly defied court orders, another said she misled a grand jury, and yet somehow she got described as merely "masquerading" as U.S. attorney, as if she’d just wandered in on Halloween wearing a "Federal Prosecutor" costume. The cases against Comey and James were tossed because her appointment was unlawful, she quietly left DOJ in January, and now the Florida Bar is investigating whether impersonating a U.S. attorney and wrecking prosecutions for partisan stunts is maybe, possibly, not what the rule of law is supposed to look like.
#lawlessness#corruption
house to constitution: we were on a break
The House of Representatives heroically defends America from the grave threat of having to follow its own Constitution.
The House just looked at an unauthorized air and naval war with Iran, shrugged, and said, "seems fine." By a 212–219 vote, Republicans (plus a helpful handful of Democrats) killed a bipartisan war powers resolution from Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna that would have forced Trump to stop playing commander-in-chief-by-impulse until Congress actually authorized the conflict. Six US troops and at least 1,230 Iranians are dead so far, but the real emergency, according to Speaker Mike Johnson, is that limiting Trump might "empower our enemies" — unlike, say, lurching into a region-wide war with no clear objective.
The Senate GOP already torpedoed a similar measure, and Republican leaders in both chambers have decided that Trump was magically "authorized" to start bombing Iran because… reasons. Marco Rubio, now cosplaying as secretary of state, can’t keep his story straight about why the US attacked or what the goal is, beyond "Israel was going to hit them first" and the always-reliable "trust us." Constitutional requirements? The 1973 War Powers Resolution? Massie and Warren Davidson politely pointed out that none of the legal triggers for war have been met, which is adorable, because Congress abandoned that standard somewhere between Vietnam and the Bush administration.
Hakeem Jeffries noted that the country is drowning in an affordability crisis Trump promised to fix on "day one," but instead we’re burning billions on a foreign war with undefined aims and undefined legal authority. A few members, like Jared Moskowitz, tried to resuscitate congressional relevance, warning that "Congress is on the verge of irrelevancy." The vote result suggests we’re well past "on the verge" and deep into "organ donor." The branch that’s supposed to declare war just took another step toward being a very expensive comment section on the president’s foreign policy livestream.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump-pardoned jan. 6 'patriot' gets life for child sex crimes
Andrew Johnson at the Capitol on Jan. 6, auditioning for a presidential pardon and, apparently, a future life sentence.
Donald Trump’s great patriotic prison-reform experiment continues to pay dividends. Andrew Paul Johnson, a Jan. 6 rioter whom Trump personally helped spring with his blanket insurrection amnesty, just got sentenced to life in prison for molesting children. Truly the best people, handpicked from the country’s finest pool of cop-beaters and would‑be coup participants.
Johnson wasn’t just a child predator; he allegedly tried to keep one of his victims quiet by promising them a cut of the taxpayer-funded windfall he expected to get from the Justice Department after his pardon. That’s right: he weaponized Trump-world’s fantasy of government payouts for Jan. 6 defendants as a hush-money pitch to a child. When the MAGA martyrdom industry meets garden‑variety depravity, this is what crawls out.
Trump has openly mused about compensating Jan. 6 defendants with public money, and the DOJ under his administration already handed almost $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot while climbing through a smashed Capitol window. Meanwhile, other pardoned or prosecuted Jan. 6 heroes keep racking up fresh charges — one for assault and battery on a Metro train, another for allegedly threatening a Capitol Police officer. The "law and order" movement sure produces a lot of repeat customers for the justice system.
So the Trump legacy on criminal justice reform is crystal clear: turn insurrectionists into a protected class, float taxpayer cash for their troubles, and act shocked when some of them turn out to be violent predators who treat pardons like a loyalty badge and a business opportunity. Back the blue, unless they’re in your way — or investigating you.
#forever-grifting#lawlessness#killing-democracy
who is markwayne mullin and why is he in charge of civil liberties
Markwayne Mullin, moments before being handed control of one of the largest domestic security apparatuses on Earth, presumably after answering "Yes" to the interview question: "Will you do what I say, no matter how illegal?"
Trump has decided that the Department of Homeland Security — the agency that runs immigration enforcement, border security, and a good chunk of the domestic surveillance funhouse — should now be overseen by Sen. Markwayne Mullin, whose main qualifications appear to be: (1) unwavering loyalty to Trump, (2) a flair for performative rage, and (3) a long record of treating "national security" as a magic spell that makes constitutional rights disappear.
Instead of picking someone who might see DHS as a serious, terrifyingly powerful institution that needs restraint, Trump has gone with a guy whose brand is basically "what if Fox News comments section, but with subpoena power." Mullin has backed Trump’s hardest-line immigration fantasies, cheered on crackdowns on migrants, and treated dissent as a security threat — exactly the temperament you want running an agency with its own armed forces and detention network.
So as war with Iran spreads, Americans are stranded abroad, and DHS’s mission should be "protect people, don’t shred the Constitution," Trump’s solution is to hand the keys to a reliable culture-war arsonist. If you were hoping for someone who sees civil liberties as more than an obstacle to be bulldozed, this administration would like to unsubscribe you from reality.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#fascism
hegseth dusts off the monroe doctrine, threatens latin america with 'friendship'
Pete Hegseth explains that Latin America can either join America’s noble fight against 'narco-communism' or enjoy the deluxe unilateral freedom package previously tested in Venezuela.
Pete Hegseth, now somehow in charge of the Pentagon instead of a Fox & Friends greenroom, told a roomful of Latin American defense officials that the US is ready to "go on offence" against drug cartels with or without them. This, after the Trump administration already used the "war on drugs" as a costume for the first US ground attack on a South American country in history, bagging Nicolás Maduro and then casually admitting the real goal was Venezuela's oil. So it's less "Just Say No" and more "Just Say Oil Fields".
The brains behind this masterclass in 1980s cosplay is Stephen Miller, who announced that cartels can only be defeated with military force and should be treated "just as brutally and just as ruthlessly" as Isis and al-Qaida. Designate cartels as terrorists, invoke the forever-war playbook, and suddenly half the hemisphere is a target-rich environment. Experts pointing out that decades of militarized drug policy have only fueled violence and failed to dent supply were politely ignored, because nuance doesn't look good on a PowerPoint at US Southern Command.
Hegseth also lovingly resurrected the Monroe Doctrine, praising "America for Americans" while urging countries to stay "Christian nations" with "strong borders" and resist "radical narco-communism" and "uncontrolled mass migration". So the pitch is: let Washington run your security policy, embrace US-backed intervention, and maybe we won't unilaterally bomb your coastline under the banner of faith, family, and forward-deployed Marines. It's not diplomacy; it's a protection racket with Bible verses and drone footage.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
make america healthy again (but only for bayer)
Trump’s idea of a healthy food policy: a kale smoothie ad on TV and a glyphosate executive order in the Federal Register.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in wellness: telling you to fear ultra-processed food in Super Bowl ads while quietly handing legal immunity to the people making the poison. Casey Means gets a primetime confirmation hearing to talk about "industrial chemical exposure" and Mike Tyson warns you about processed food, and then – in the part they don’t put in the ad – Trump’s lawyers ask the supreme court to protect Bayer from farmers who claim its products gave them cancer.
The White House follows that up with an executive order to crank out more glyphosate, a weedkiller linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and a Friday-night-special reapproval of dicamba, the herbicide so drifty it basically cosplays as a chemical weapon for your neighbor’s crops. Meanwhile, House Republicans try to stuff the farm bill with liability shields for agrochemical makers, block EPA from regulating PFAS "forever chemicals" in sewage sludge, and pack EPA with industry alumni like Nancy Beck, Lynn Dekleva, and Kyle Kunkler. Regulatory capture has gone from quiet background corruption to full-time branding strategy.
Out in public, RFK Jr’s MAHA movement yells about toxic food dyes and the food pyramid while its supposed Republican allies shovel gifts at Big Ag and the chemical lobby. MAHA leaders are now planning a rally against Trump’s pesticide immunity push and glyphosate order, because even the wellness cranks can see the grift. Polling shows huge bipartisan support for banning pesticides already outlawed in Europe and for candidates who prioritize healthy food – which, naturally, Democrats are half-heartedly mumbling about while the GOP runs a full-spectrum gaslighting campaign about being the "party of healthy food" as they deregulate everyone’s bloodstream.
So on one side you have Senator Cory Booker and others trying to pass a Pesticide Injury Accountability Act so people can actually sue over being poisoned. On the other side, you have Trump’s team racing to make sure the only thing that’s truly bulletproof in America is Monsanto’s balance sheet. The MAHA slogan writes itself: eat clean, sue never.
#corruption#forever-grifting
trump admin to americans in west bank: thoughts, prayers, no sanctions
Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, and Mike Huckabee carefully ignoring a stack of letters about dead Americans while polishing the "unshakeable alliance" brand.
More than 30 senators just sent Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, and Mike Huckabee a politely furious letter asking why nine American citizens have been killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers in the West Bank since 2022 and not a single person has been criminally convicted. Apparently "protecting Americans" now comes with a long list of exemptions, starting with: are they Palestinian, and were they killed by a US-backed ally?
Nasrallah Abu Siyam, a 19-year-old born in Philadelphia, was shot in February during a settler attack on Palestinian farmers while Israeli soldiers allegedly stood by, offered no aid, and made no arrests. He joins a grim roster that includes journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, protester Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, elderly detainee Omar Assad, arson victim Khamis al-Ayyada, and three minors. The Netanyahu government has produced zero accountability; the Trump administration has produced zero consequences – a real bipartisan effort in abandoning your own citizens.
The senators note that one of Trump's first acts on re-entering the White House was to revoke Biden-era sanctions on violent settlers, instantly lifting designations on 33 individuals and organizations. Shockingly, once the message "go wild" was sent from Washington, settler violence spiked and villages started emptying out under coordinated attacks, often with Israeli forces helping or just quietly supervising the ethnic cleansing. The State and Justice Departments, asked to comment on this pattern of Americans dying with no justice, responded with their now-standard position: radio silence.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's own John Fetterman somehow can't find the time to sign a letter about a Philadelphia-born American being killed, presumably because nothing must interfere with his brand as Israel's loudest hype man. The senators ask how many more Americans have to die before the administration takes "serious, credible steps" toward accountability. Given the track record, the Trump team appears to be workshopping a different question: how many can die before anyone in power does anything at all.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
