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
texas gop tests new ‘what if voting just…didn’t work?’ blueprint
Texans waiting in line to vote while Republicans run stress tests on how much democracy you can delete with a signage change and three voting machines.
Texas Republicans just beta-tested a new feature of American democracy: now with extra disenfranchisement. After years of smooth countywide voting, the GOP parties in Dallas and Williamson counties suddenly refused to run joint primaries, blowing up a system that worked and replacing it with a choose-your-own-adventure maze of polling places, missing signs, and three voting machines for thirteen precincts. Shockingly, when you funnel hundreds of people into understaffed sites and send others ping-ponging between locations, some of them give up and go home.
The Texas supreme court then helpfully waded in to clarify things by…ordering that votes from people not in line by 7pm be segregated, just to really underline that the point here is not "count every vote" but "find creative ways not to." Voting-rights advocates and the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson spelled out the obvious: this isn’t a glitch, it’s a blueprint – a live-fire test of how far partisan officials can go in sabotaging elections under the cover of "procedural changes" and "conspiracy theory" panic. The pattern is already familiar: gerrymander communities of color, then make election day such a bureaucratic obstacle course that young, working-class, and nonwhite voters are the ones falling through the cracks.
Republicans get to claim they’re just making "local decisions" while the actual impact is that people who showed up, stood in line, and did everything right are told, functionally, "oops, democracy not available in your area today." And yet, as Texas Democrats keep pointing out, the sheer effort the establishment is putting into making voting miserable is also a tell: if your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be working this hard to make sure you never cast it.
#killing-democracy#racism
trump mad that kristi noem said the quiet $220 million part out loud
Kristi Noem explains, with a straight face, how a $220 million self-deportation ad blitz and a half-shutdown DHS are all part of having “the most secure border in American history.”
Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security cosplay sheriff, is suddenly on the chopping block because she committed the unpardonable sin in Trumpworld: she told the truth
in public. Under oath, she admitted that Trump knew about her decision to approve a
$220 million “please deport yourself” ad campaign that was conveniently routed through a process with
limited competitive bidding — because if there’s one thing this administration hates more than immigrants, it’s open procurement rules.
Trump, naturally, is furious — not about the giant propaganda slush fund to pressure immigrants to leave, or about the
shootings by immigration officers in Minneapolis that happened on her watch — but because Noem linked him to the decision on live TV. Republicans are now quietly passing around replacement names like they’re picking a new “Apprentice” finalist: Sens. Markwayne Mullin and Steve Daines are reportedly on the short list to inherit this flaming dumpster of a department.
Meanwhile, DHS is in a partial shutdown because funding expired on Feb. 13, freezing parts of TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard and cybersecurity, while the White House uses the crisis to squeeze Democrats for harsher immigration enforcement. Noem’s spokesperson insists that under her leadership we have “the most secure border in American history,” 3 million people have left, and the lowest murder rate in 125 years — a set of claims so grandiose they might as well have added that she personally repaired the ozone layer and balanced the federal budget on her lunch break. But sure, the real problem here is her
hearing performance, not the sprawling, weaponized immigration machine they’ve built.
#anti-immigration#forever-grifting
trump’s foreign policy chickens attempt to roost
Artist’s impression of US foreign policy: one guy on trial in Brooklyn, several guys erased by a missile, and Trump on TV declaring it all a personal win.
A Pakistani businessman is on trial in Brooklyn for allegedly trying to hire hitmen to kill Donald Trump, and his defense is basically: the IRGC made me do it. Asif Merchant says Iran’s Revolutionary Guard threatened his wife and adopted daughter in Tehran unless he came to the US, recruited criminals, laundered money, stole documents, and, oh yes, arranged a political assassination. Instead of hardened killers, he found undercover FBI agents who let him spill the whole plan on tape while he sketched it out on a napkin like a discount Bond villain.
Prosecutors are not exactly buying the "I was just a terrified family man accidentally working with a designated terrorist organization" story. They say there’s zero evidence for a real duress defense and plenty of evidence that Merchant knew exactly what he was doing, including recordings where he politely inquires if someone could "maybe, you can, say, kill someone" — a political figure whose name he claimed he still hadn’t been given. The FBI also had an informant embedded the whole time, because if there’s one American export that still works, it’s surveillance.
The trial helpfully opened just as the US and Israel were busy vaporizing Iran’s supreme leader and over a thousand other people, with defense secretary Pete Hegseth bragging that a US strike also killed the alleged mastermind of the 2024 Trump assassination plot. It’s not clear if that’s the same person Merchant says handled him, but the message is clear: the Trump administration’s approach to rule of law is jury trial for the middleman, drone strike for the guy higher up the food chain. Trump, never one to miss an opportunity for self-mythology, summed up the whole thing to ABC News with: “I got him before he got me.” American foreign policy, now officially a Marvel origin story.
Iran denies targeting Trump or anyone else, the US insists it heroically preempted an assassination, and a Brooklyn jury is left to sort through a mess where everyone claims to be the real victim. It’s a tidy snapshot of Trump-era national security: sprawling covert plots, secret informants, extrajudicial killings overseas, and a former president publicly boasting about having someone blown up like that’s just another campaign talking point. Checks and balances, but make it paramilitary.
#national-security#imperialism#killing-democracy
trump turns tiktok ban into loyalty rewards program
Trump and Pam Bondi in the Oval Office, presumably workshopping new ways to turn federal law into a customer loyalty program for their friends.
Joe Biden signed a law saying TikTok had to find a U.S. owner before Trump waddled back into the Oval Office, and the Supreme Court even helpfully underlined it in red: divest or get out. The Trump administration’s response? Simply pretend the law doesn’t exist, issue an executive order extending the deadline that had already passed, and tell Attorney General Pam Bondi to sit on her hands instead of enforcing it. Rule of law is for the poors; presidents get store credit.
The result: a "rescue" deal where ByteDance keeps the algorithm (hello, Beijing propaganda lever) while Oracle and a Trump‑blessed investor group grab control of U.S. data and moderation. As Brendan Ballou of the Public Integrity Project politely explains, this is the worst possible setup for users and free speech — China can censor what it doesn’t like, and Trump’s tech pals can censor what they don’t like. A bipartisan censorship buffet, brought to you by the guy who screams about cancel culture.
The lawsuit spells out the rest of the swamp: Oracle’s Larry Ellison — who once hosted a $100,000‑a‑head Trump fundraiser — is part of the investor group, his son is buying up media properties, and their business ambitions now conveniently depend on Trump’s regulators. The complaint dryly notes these firms "have close ties to the President, and have at times personally enriched him," which is lawyer-speak for this looks like a mob kickback with better branding. Two shareholders in Alphabet and Meta are suing, saying Trump’s decision not to enforce the law cost them money. Trump, meanwhile, appears to have converted a national security mandate into a VIP cash‑back program for loyal oligarchs.
Public Integrity Project, a brand-new anti-corruption outfit starring people like Russ Feingold, picked this as lawsuit number one. When you launch an organization to fight "exploding" corruption and immediately land on the TikTok‑Oracle‑Trump triangle, you’re basically saying the Trump White House isn’t an administration — it’s a rewards club for billionaires who promise to make the news more conservative and the president more rich.
#corruption#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump shuts one death camp, orders 24 more on amazon prime
Artist’s rendering of DHS “high standards”: a collapsing tent city, a measles quarantine sign, and a giant "NOW HIRING: PRIVATE PRISON CONTRACTORS" banner flapping proudly in the toxic wind.
The Trump administration is reportedly closing Camp East Montana, the Fort Bliss tent gulag where three detainees died and a measles outbreak has people in quarantine, which in ICE-speak apparently means the experiment was too on-the-nose. The $1.2bn contract with private profiteer Acquisition Logistics LLC is being quietly lined up for termination, no explanation offered, presumably because "our guards might have homicidally choked a man to death" doesn’t test well in the focus groups.
DHS, naturally, is out here bragging about its "rigorous audits" and "high standards" at a facility where ICE’s own inspectors found dozens of violations and detainees report beatings, food deprivation, medical neglect, and 24/7 construction noise. One man’s death is now being investigated as a homicide after witnesses say five guards choked him; another detainee died after health complications; a third is labeled a "presumed suicide" in a system where people mysteriously keep dying and the agency’s story changes every news cycle.
And since this is the Trump era, closing one plague-ridden death camp is just the prelude to the bigger, shinier horror: ICE’s "new detention model" of spending more than $38bn to buy and convert up to 24 warehouses into mass immigration camps. While officials dismiss abuse reports as "fake news" and federal officers are already shooting unarmed protesters in Minneapolis, the administration is scaling up the infrastructure for a national warehouse-gulag system. Camp East Montana isn’t an aberration; it’s the beta test.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump’s $400 million party room for oligarchs
The White House, now featuring the West Wing, a construction zone, and the ghost of basic norms sobbing quietly off-camera.
The National Capital Planning Commission, now conveniently run by Trump loyalists, is set to review and possibly rubber-stamp the president’s dream project: a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom that required literally demolishing the East Wing of the People’s House. He’s a temporary tenant, but he’s renovating like a guy who just found out the landlord died without a will.
This follows Trump firing all six members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts last fall and replacing them with allies who promptly approved the design, because nothing says “independent review” like clearing out the whole board to make way for your $400 million presidential quinceañera venue. Preservationists sued to stop this architectural ego trip, but a federal judge dismissed their objections as a “ragtag group of theories,” apparently finding “don’t let the president bulldoze historic federal property for a mega-ballroom funded by shadow donors” too abstract a legal concept.
The cost has already doubled from Trump’s original $200 million estimate to $400 million, all supposedly covered by “private donors” and Trump himself. There’s a donor list with big corporations on it, but donors are allowed to stay anonymous and no one knows who gave how much. So we’ve got a president tearing down part of the White House, building a massive new event space, and paying for it with opaque corporate and possibly foreign money, outside normal congressional approval. Definitely nothing to see here, just American democracy getting flipped like a condemned row house to make room for the world’s most corrupt wedding venue.
#corruption#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump’s illegal tariffs get a $130bn refund policy
Customs and Border Protection prepares to press Ctrl+Z on $130bn of Trump’s ‘very legal, very cool’ tariffs.
Turns out Donald Trump’s big, tough trade policy was less “4D chess” and more “accidentally robbed 300,000 businesses and hoped no one would notice.” A judge on the US Court of International Trade has now ordered the government to start paying back potentially billions in illegal tariffs after the supreme court ruled Trump’s IEEPA-based cash grab was, minor detail, unlawful. The US collected more than $130bn this way, because why just abuse emergency powers for foreign policy when you can also use them as your own personal tax machine?
Customs and Border Protection is crying that fixing this is “unprecedented” and may require manually reviewing more than 70 million entries, which is what happens when you let a reality TV landlord improvise trade law on national security grounds. Judge Richard Eaton, sounding like a kindergarten teacher dealing with a very lazy student, basically replied: you already do refunds every day, push the button and pay people back—with interest. Over 300,000 mostly small importers are now waiting to see if they’ll actually get their money, or if the government will turn this into the world’s least fun rebate program.
Roughly 2,000 lawsuits are already stacked up, all saying the same thing: the tariffs Trump shoved through under IEEPA were illegal and everyone wants their cut of the refund pile. Eaton has no interest in hearing thousands of near-identical cases and is pushing for an across-the-board system so importers can get their money without hiring a lawyer or sacrificing three years of their life to paperwork. The Trump administration called it “America First.” The courts are now calling it what it was: unlawful duties, please line up for your reimbursement.
#trade-war#lawlessness#forever-grifting
america’s bravest victims of mean looks and protest signs
Kristi Noem bravely testifies about the unprecedented danger of being yelled at in a blue city while armed, armored, and backed by the federal government.
The Trump–Vance White House has discovered a bold new frontier in law enforcement heroism: nobody dying. Despite DHS officials endlessly insisting that deportation officers face "unprecedented threats" and a "dangerous environment", the agency’s own records show that no ICE deportation officer has been violently killed in the line of duty since the agency was created in 2003. Of the 15 Enforcement and Removal Operations deaths, almost all were from Covid, with the remaining cases tied to a heart attack during a chase and heat stress in training. The last time someone in a comparable deportation role was killed by violence was 1949, back when Harry Truman was president and nobody had invented Fox News.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
trump admin discovers herd immunity, forgets the 'immunity' part
CDC headquarters, now specializing in vibes-based epidemiology and post-hoc thoughts and prayers.
The Trump administration has apparently decided that measles is just America’s new roommate. A senior CDC official, Dr Ralph Abraham, helpfully described the surge in cases and child deaths as the “cost of doing business”, which is a bold way to talk about a disease we basically eradicated before MAGA discovered YouTube wellness influencers. Abraham then resigned, presumably to spend more time with his talking points about how we “can’t rely exclusively on vaccination” while 94% of cases are in the unvaccinated or mystery-status crowd.
Meanwhile, CDC social media has gone from public health watchdog to witness protection program. Instead of clear outbreak alerts, they managed a rare post scolding people for calling this an American policy failure, then put out a vaccine video that somehow forgot to mention the word "vaccine" in the text. That’s not messaging, that’s performance art. Experts say the real story is the administration’s massive cuts to CDC funding and disease surveillance, which have slowed reporting, crippled outbreak tracking, and left the country flying blind while case counts blow past 1,000 and fatalities quietly stack up.
Congress finally tried to patch the holes by restoring much of the CDC’s money, so the White House responded by looking for other ways to yank hundreds of millions from state and local health departments. Also on the chopping block: wastewater surveillance, which is one of the cheapest, most effective early-warning systems we have. The administration wants to slash that from $125m to $25m, because why invest in detecting measles when you can just call deaths a rounding error? As one expert put it, if we just vaccinated kids, we wouldn’t need all this extra surveillance. But that would require a government that prefers science over Facebook grifters and doesn’t treat child mortality as a line item.
#anti-science#healthcare#killing-democracy
trump considers canceling elections, democrats argue about kamala again
Democracy, pictured here moments before being replaced by a national emergency and a strongly worded DNC memo.
Kamala Harris is quietly workshopping her 2028 "third time’s the charm" tour while the Democratic establishment performs its favorite ritual: ignoring why young voters hate them and pretending Gaza never happened. Harris has spent the post-2024 era selling a memoir nobody wanted, backing losing candidates, and still somehow failing to locate a single conviction that isn’t means-tested by her donor list. The party’s big insight from its own secret autopsy on her loss? Hide the report so no one has to admit that treating genocide like an inconvenient polling crosstab might have consequences.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the smoldering republic, Trump and his fan club are workshopping a more direct approach to politics: just don’t have elections. Pro-Trump activists are reportedly urging the White House to declare a national emergency based on imaginary Chinese interference in 2020, then use it to ban mail ballots and voting machines because democracy is apparently a biohazard now. Trump has also repeatedly floated the idea of skipping elections altogether and running for an unconstitutional third term, which his press secretary assures us is just a hilarious joke — kind of like the Bill of Rights, but with fewer punchlines.
So as the GOP openly toys with emergency rule and dismantling what’s left of free and fair elections, the Democratic response is to quietly hope Kamala Harris takes the hint and bows out so they can find a "winner" who might, someday, be willing to draw the line at genocide, let alone at autocracy. Ta-Nehisi Coates politely notes that if you can’t oppose mass slaughter, you probably can’t be trusted to defend democracy either. The 2028 plan thus appears to be: one party testing how far it can go toward canceling elections, and the other testing how many voters it can alienate while still calling itself the resistance.
#killing-democracy#fascism
small business administration rebrands as small bigotry administration
Pictured: a successful immigrant restaurateur, precisely the kind of person the Trump–Loeffler Small Business Administration is now working overtime to keep from succeeding.
The agency created to help mom-and-pop shops just announced it’s more interested in mom-and-pop nationalism. Under Trump megadonor and failed senator Kelly Loeffler, the Small Business Administration has quietly decided that legal permanent residents – you know, the people who pay taxes and follow the law – are now ineligible for SBA-backed loans for the first time in the agency’s history. Green card holders, once good enough to own up to 49% of an SBA-backed business, are now good for exactly nothing, because the billionaire in charge needs to prove she can bully immigrants harder than the last billionaire.
This follows Loeffler’s earlier move demanding that 100% of a business be owned by citizens or green card holders (no mixed ownership, comrades) and her promise to yank regional offices out of "sanctuary cities" that refuse to treat Trump’s immigration agenda like divine revelation. Now she’s slapped an "America First" label on outright discrimination, bragging on the SBA’s own website about keeping "illegal aliens" and "coastal elites" out of the driver’s seat, while quietly tossing legal immigrants out of the car entirely. It’s a federal small-business program turned into a loyalty test: love Trump, hate immigrants, and maybe the government will underwrite your Subway franchise.
Immigrant entrepreneurs who’ve been building restaurants, shops, and manufacturing outfits across the country are being told that the government they help fund is closed for them, permanently, because the ruling party needs a new culture-war chew toy. The SBA, once boringly bipartisan and technocratic, is now another cog in the machine of Trump-era ethnic gatekeeping – a reminder that under this administration, the real small business being nurtured is the one selling state-sanctioned discrimination as "commonsense economics".
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy#racism
justice department rebrands as trump 2026 campaign headquarters
The Justice Department, now featuring a giant Trump banner, for those who were still confused about who the law really serves.
The Justice Department has finally dropped the pretense and gone full campaign office, complete with a giant banner of Donald Trump’s scowling face draped over Main Justice like it’s a mid-tier casino, not the nation’s top law enforcement agency. Under Attorney General Pam Bondi — whose main qualification appears to be never saying no to Dear Leader — DOJ is now busy chasing Trump’s conspiracy theories and enemies list, from Jerome Powell to Tim Walz, while real law takes a long, unpaid sabbatical.
Instead of prosecuting crimes, Bondi’s crew is raiding a Georgia election office in Fulton County to hunt for evidence of 2020 fraud that’s already been debunked more times than Trump has declared himself the “most persecuted man in history.” The raid was greenlit off a referral from Kurt Olsen, a 2020 election denier whom Trump has installed as “director of election security and integrity,” which is a bit like making George Santos head of the Office of Government Ethics. Meanwhile, Bondi is suing 30 states to hand over voter registration data, despite lacking clear legal authority, because nothing says “limited government” like a federal dragnet for everyone’s personal voting info.
On the side, DOJ is trying to criminalize policy disagreements. Jerome Powell is under investigation for the shocking offense of not setting interest rates to match Trump’s mood swings, and Minnesota governor Tim Walz is being probed for supposedly “obstructing” federal immigration enforcement by criticizing the administration’s lethal clown show at the border. When a grand jury refused to indict Democratic senator Mark Kelly and others for a video saying troops shouldn’t follow illegal orders, Trump responded by calling it “seditious behavior punishable by death,” because subtlety is for democracies that still work.
To really drive the point home, Bondi issued a memo telling DOJ employees they must “zealously advance, protect and defend” Trump’s interests, turning the department from the people’s lawyer into Trump’s personal goon squad — though as one former prosecutor dryly noted, even a normal law firm at least pretends to follow the law. Ex-prosecutors are calling it a “subversion of the justice system.” Trump calls it justice. Everyone else calls it what it is: the justice department being repurposed as the authoritarian cosplay division of the Trump White House.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
jd vance and dr. oz declare war on poor people, call it medicaid fraud
Tim Walz and Keith Ellison patiently explain to Congress that Minnesota can do math, unlike the Trump administration’s Medicaid cosplay task force.
Minnesota has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of "weaponizing Medicaid" against the state as political payback, because of course the health insurance program for low-income people is now just another blunt object in Trump's grievance toolbox. The feds are sitting on roughly $250 million in Medicaid matching funds that Minnesota already spent last summer, citing a supposed "war on fraud" that just happened to be announced by Vice President JD Vance 24 hours earlier. Nothing says good-faith oversight like retroactively yanking healthcare money from a swing state while the cameras are rolling.
Vance and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz — yes, your aunt’s favorite daytime TV supplement salesman is now in charge of federal healthcare dollars — held a press conference to brag about "temporarily" halting Minnesota’s funds so the state would "take its obligations seriously." Minnesota’s Deputy Health Commissioner John Connolly responded with the bureaucratic version of "are you kidding me," pointing out that the state already submitted a corrective action plan and has a Medicaid error rate of 2%, way below the national 6%. Federal prosecutors floated a dramatic "billions in fraud" number; the state says the real figure is in the tens of millions, which is bad, but not exactly "shut down healthcare for poor people" bad.
The lawsuit argues this isn’t about fraud at all, it’s about punishment — using federal healthcare dollars as a political cattle prod. So now, low-income Minnesotans get to be extras in the administration’s latest performance of Strongman Theater: Medicaid Edition, starring JD Vance as the nation’s new moral accountant and Mehmet Oz as the guy who used to hawk raspberry ketones and now decides whether your state’s children get medical care.
#killing-democracy#healthcare
golden dome, golden grift
Steve Feinberg proudly presents the Golden Dome for America, a state-of-the-art missile shield designed to intercept threats and redirect them into his old portfolio.
The Pentagon’s number two, billionaire Steve Feinberg, has discovered a bold new innovation in defense contracting: just have your old firm win. Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity shop he founded and ran until very recently, now owns at least four companies getting slices of Trump’s $151 billion "Golden Dome for America" missile shield — a project Feinberg conveniently oversees. He supposedly "divested," but ethics records show he keeps a cozy, open-ended financial relationship with Cerberus for tax, accounting, and health care. Truly inspiring to see continuity of care extended to conflict of interest.
This is all laid out in nearly 3,200 newly released financial disclosures showing Trump officials are financially entangled with the very industries they regulate. That includes Attorney General Pam Bondi and other senior officials making perfectly timed stock trades right before Trump’s tariff announcements cratered markets, EPA scientists who used to literally work for the chemical lobby now downplaying formaldehyde risks, and a Justice Department number two, Todd Blanche, who owned at least $159,000 in crypto assets while helpfully shutting down investigations into crypto companies. A DOJ spokesperson swears it was all properly "cleared" — by whom, they decline to say, presumably out of respect for the integrity of the rubber stamp.
Trump didn’t stumble into this; he bulldozed the guardrails on day one. He scrapped Biden’s ethics pledge, fired 17 inspectors general, decapitated the Office of Government Ethics, and left it leaderless. Then he openly bragged that he realized nobody cared he was profiting in office, while raking in foreign-flavored crypto money and accepting a $400 million Boeing 747 from Qatar, plus nearly $1 billion in U.S. nuclear program funds to retrofit his new toy. A longtime government ethics lawyer sums it up: "Ethics is in the toilet." The White House insists this is the "most transparent administration in history" — and to be fair, they’re extremely transparent about not giving a damn.
So the Golden Dome is less a missile shield and more a giant, shimmering paywall over American democracy: defense contractors, crypto whales, foreign governments, and Trump’s friends on the inside all getting a turn at the slot machine. The only thing being intercepted and destroyed here is the concept of public service.
#corruption#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
americans stranded, warships sunk, but trump’s busy with a texas primary
Americans at a packed Middle East airport discovering the Trump evacuation plan is basically: ‘have you tried not being there?’
The Middle East is erupting, a U.S. submarine has just torpedoed an Iranian warship, and thousands of Americans are now stranded trying to get out. So naturally, the Trump administration is laser-focused on the most urgent national priority: endorsing someone in a nasty Texas Senate primary. Foreign policy? Consular protection? Evacuation planning? Please, there are donors to impress and cable hits to book.
While Americans scramble for flights and wonder if their government remembers they exist, the war footing ramps up and the White House treats them like inconvenient background extras in Trump’s latest ratings stunt. The State Department’s message appears to be: good luck, stay safe, and don’t forget to vote for whoever Dear Leader blesses in Texas. It’s a perfect snapshot of Trump-era national security: play battleship with Iran on live TV, then shrug when actual Americans get caught in the middle.
Rule of law, international norms, and basic duty of care to citizens are all gently placed in the shredder while the administration chases its next domestic political “win.” The only real evacuation plan seems to be evacuating responsibility.
#national-security#killing-democracy
trump’s montana errand boy ghosts the ballot deadline
Steve Daines explains that after deep soul-searching, he’s decided the best person to represent Montana is whoever the GOP donor spreadsheet already picked.
Steve Daines, longtime Trump footstool and alleged senator from Montana, suddenly remembered he has "wrestled" with a decision for months and, in a heroic burst of last‑minute clarity, dropped his re-election bid minutes before the filing deadline. Nothing says thoughtful leadership like a political Irish exit at 4:59pm.
Rather than risk voters actually judging his record of rubber‑stamping Trumpism, Daines announced it was "time for new leaders like Tim Sheehy" to fight for Montana, which is an elegant way of saying: please replace me with a fresher face who will vote the exact same way but doesn’t have my baggage. Conveniently, GOP loyalist and US attorney Kurt Alme dove into the race right before the buzzer, while former University of Montana president Seth Bodnar launched an independent bid just to highlight how completely Montana Democrats have been reduced to background extras.
Democrats hold zero statewide offices after Jon Tester’s 2024 loss, no big names have filed, and the state’s Senate seat is basically being passed around inside the Republican Party like a company car. Daines may be stepping aside, but the Trump-aligned Senate apparatus he helped build is staying right where it is, humming along for oligarchs and donors while voters get to pick their favorite flavor of the same agenda.
#oligarchy#trumps-america
