trump’s immigration thugs kill, smear, then go radio silent
Kristi Noem explains how an unarmed mom and an ICU nurse were actually terrifying threats to national security, as the administration that killed them can’t be reached for comment.
The Trump administration’s immigration machine just added another entry to its growing ledger of state-sanctioned cruelty. Renee Good, a 37-year-old unarmed US citizen and mother of three, was shot and killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis. Her family says no one from the Trump administration has bothered to call, write, or pretend to care. Instead, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem jumped straight to branding Good a “domestic terrorist”, because why investigate when you can just slander the dead on national TV?
Good’s family has had to hire their own investigators and request a private autopsy, which found she was shot three times – forearm, breast, and head – while Trump’s people pumped out false claims and moved on to the next talking point. Her parents and brothers describe a gentle mother devoted to her kids, while the government that killed her can’t even muster a boilerplate condolence call. Accountability has been outsourced to grieving relatives, because the state is too busy defending the shooter and preserving its narrative.
And if one killing by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis wasn’t dystopian enough, a few weeks later they fatally shot 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti. His parents say he was horrified by Trump’s immigration crackdown and the kidnapping of children. Now he’s dead too – another citizen gunned down by federal officers in a city that’s supposedly not a war zone. The administration’s message is clear: they’ll shoot you, lie about you, call you a terrorist, and then disappear, leaving families and communities to bury the dead while the machinery of repression rolls on.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
trump admin discovers refugees come with an expiration date now
DHS calendar showing refugees turning from "welcome" to "arrestable" at midnight on day 366, because nothing says rule of law like magic deportation anniversaries.
The Trump administration has been running a fun little experiment in Minnesota where refugees apparently turn into arrestable contraband on day 366 of living legally in the United States. DHS decided that once refugees hit their one-year mark — the point when they can apply for a green card — immigration agents could suddenly scoop them up and toss them into detention for "days, weeks or even months" despite no criminal charges, no removal proceedings, and no public safety issues. Just vibes and paperwork.
A federal judge, rudely insisting on reading the actual statute, blocked the policy and noted that the government was effectively "terrorizing" people who had already been rigorously vetted and lawfully admitted. The opinion dryly points out that Congress never gave DHS the power to treat the one-year anniversary of safety as the start date for a dystopian hostage program, and that turning the refugee program into a bait-and-switch raises "serious constitutional concerns" — which is lawyer-speak for what the hell are you people doing.
Under the injunction, the administration is barred from arresting and detaining refugees in Minnesota solely because they haven’t yet been converted from "lawful human beings" to "properly documented human beings". For now, refugees from Africa, Asia, and Latin America who followed every rule can go back to their normal American lives, secure in the knowledge that their government only tried to retroactively criminalize their existence, not successfully.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
93,000 dollars for a trump selfie and some light election fraud
When you drop $93,000 to stand next to Trump and it turns out the only thing you really bought was evidence for a federal indictment.
Federal prosecutors just shut down one of the Trump era’s favorite side quests: the pay-to-play selfie grift. New York businesswoman Sherry Xue Li is headed to prison for nine years after stealing more than $30m from foreign investors, promising them a fake development project and a magic green card, then laundering some of the loot into US political campaigns. Among the perks: charging investors $93,000 a head for entry to a 2017 Trump fundraiser and using the cash to make $600,000 in illegal donations.
The scam was basically EB-5 meets Mar-a-Lago photo line. Li and her partner, Lianbo Wang, allegedly blew investor money on luxury shopping, housing, vacations, and fine dining, then sold "access" to US politicians like it was a timeshare presentation with a Secret Service detail. Li even scored a photo with Donald and Melania and then used that image as marketing collateral for her totally-not-real development project. American democracy: now with VIP package pricing.
Prosecutors stress that the campaigns and committees were "unaware" of the scheme and face no charges, which is a polite way of saying our campaign finance system is so broken you can shove $600,000 of illegally sourced cash through it and everyone just shrugs as long as the checks clear. Li forfeits $31.5m and some properties; the politicians keep the money and the plausible deniability. The house always wins, even when the casino finally jails one of the dealers.
#corruption#forever-grifting#money
fbi director takes olympic beer bong, trump pretends to care about ethics
Kash Patel, hard at work safeguarding America by testing the structural integrity of a locker-room table with a beer in hand and a government jet on the tarmac.
Kash Patel, the man currently cosplaying as FBI Director, went viral for shotgunning a beer and pounding a locker-room table with the U.S. men’s hockey team after their gold-medal win over Canada in Milan. The video was fun, the context less so: Patel was there on what he swears was an "official" trip, conveniently using government aircraft while also taking in one of the hottest tickets of the Winter Olympics. Now a watchdog group wants FOIA records to see whether this was national security or just taxpayer-funded sports tourism.
Trump, who famously doesn’t drink but is absolutely hammered on power, reportedly told Patel he didn’t like the optics — both the beer-chugging and the jet usage. The White House then rolled out spokeswoman Abigail Jackson to insist crime is down and that this is all proof of Trump’s glorious "law and order" agenda, which is a curious way to describe an FBI director under investigation for potential misuse of government resources who just fired at least 10 employees tied to the Mar-a-Lago documents search. Patel also revealed his own phone toll records were scooped up during the earlier Trump probes, so naturally he’s now in charge of cleaning house.
While Patel was living his best Olympic locker-room life in Italy, an armed man was shot and killed after breaching the security perimeter at Mar-a-Lago. But don’t worry: the president wasn’t there, and his top law enforcement official was very busy networking with Italian cops and celebrating gold medals. Meanwhile, Sen. Dick Durbin has asked the DOJ inspector general to investigate Patel’s alleged "joyriding" with the FBI jet, and Democracy Defenders Fund wants to know if he also scored free game tickets and other goodies. America’s premier law enforcement agency is starting to look less like the FBI and more like a frequent-flyer rewards program for Trump loyalists.
#corruption#killing-democracy
trump to texas: your lying grocery bills are wrong
Trump, confidently explaining to Texans that their wallets are wrong and only he knows what groceries really cost.
Trump is down in Texas trying to "sell" the idea that prices are coming down, which is an interesting verb choice for a guy whose economic policy has always been one part fantasy, two parts tax cuts for his donors, and a garnish of rage tweets. Instead of addressing why people still feel crushed by housing, healthcare, and food costs, he’s just rebranding reality like it’s another failed Trump steak line.
Reporters describe him leaning hard on the message that inflation is yesterday’s problem and that Americans should basically stop believing their receipts, rent checks, and bank accounts. The strategy is simple: if people are still struggling, it’s not because his policies are failing — it’s because they haven’t heard the right story yet. Why fix structural problems when you can just shout "things are cheaper!" into a microphone and hope Fox & Friends turns it into a jobs report?
So while families juggle bills and wonder why every trip to the store feels like a hostage negotiation, the president is on the road insisting everything is fine now, thank you very much, and also please remember to clap. It’s not economic relief, it’s an information war: if he can’t lower prices, he’ll try to lower expectations — and then blame you for noticing the difference.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid
trump saves america from the menace of affordable child care
Trump officials studying how to protect America from the existential threat of stable child care, but not from literally anything else.
The Biden administration tried a radical experiment in civilization: paying child care subsidies in a way that might actually stabilize child care. This, of course, could not stand. The Trump administration is now gearing up to roll it back, clutching its pearls about “fraud concerns” like that one friend who only discovers fiscal conservatism when the money’s going to poor families instead of defense contractors.
Rather than seriously tackle any documented abuse, the White House is floating the usual solution: make it harder for providers to get paid and easier for the system to collapse. The result? Parents get squeezed, child care centers wobble closer to shutting their doors, and the administration gets to pose as guardians of taxpayer dollars while quietly sabotaging one of the few supports keeping working families afloat. Fraud may be hypothetical, but the damage will be very real.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid
north carolina gop holds primaries for 'most obedient trump footstool'
North Carolina GOP voters thoughtfully evaluating which candidate can nod hardest whenever Trump’s name is mentioned.
North Carolina Republicans are holding a Senate primary, but don’t be fooled by the quaint word "election" — this is a loyalty audition. With Sen. Thom Tillis wandering off the MAGA reservation one too many times and deciding not to run again after disagreements with Trump, GOP voters are now shopping for someone who will support the president first and maybe glance at the Constitution if there’s time between rallies.
Policy? Experience? Basic attachment to reality? Adorable, but no. The stated job requirement is fealty to one man who doesn’t even live in the state. The message to would-be senators is clear: you are not being hired to represent North Carolina; you’re being hired to be Trump’s in-state franchisee. Representative democracy is out, personal cult subcontracting is in.
Tillis’ sin was disagreeing with the Dear Leader, so he’s exiting stage right while the base hunts for someone who will never make that mistake. The Senate is supposed to be the "world’s greatest deliberative body," but the North Carolina GOP is treating it like a casting call for background characters in a never-ending Trump reboot. Deliberation is overrated when you can just ask yourself, "What would the guy on Truth Social post?" and vote accordingly.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump pitches 'friendly' imperialism timeshare in cuba
Trump explains that when he says 'friendly takeover of Cuba,' he means the kind of friendship where you block the oil, grab the allies, and then offer to help rebuild what you just destroyed.
Trump, on his way to a campaign event — because of course this is campaign patter now — mused that the US might stage a "friendly takeover" of Cuba, the kind of thing you say when you’ve confused international law with a real estate seminar. Having already helped snatch Nicolás Maduro, pressured Venezuela’s leadership to open its oil reserves to foreign companies, and choked off Cuba’s fuel supply, Trump is now framing economic strangulation plus regime leverage as a very positive opportunity for Cuban exiles who "want to go back" and presumably reclaim the island like it’s a foreclosed condo.
Rather than deny any interest in old-school yankee imperialism, the administration is basically workshopping taglines for it. US officials have been chatting up Raúl Castro’s grandson on the sidelines of regional summits while Marco Rubio, now secretary of state and apparently LARPing as a Cold War mastermind, gets credit for orchestrating what one historian calls a "very impressive take down." Meanwhile, a US-registered speedboat full of heavily armed exiles just tried to storm Cuba’s coast, ending in a deadly gunfight at sea — and somehow this is all just background noise to the president openly spitballing regime change as a branding exercise.
Cuban leaders keep insisting any talks must respect sovereignty and equality, which is adorable given Washington is currently testing how far you can push an oil blockade before you can call the resulting collapse a "Berlin Wall moment." US financial domination helped trigger the 1959 revolution, so naturally the Trump-Rubio brain trust has decided the winning strategy is: run it back, but with more sanctions and better TV hits. Friendly takeover is doing a lot of work here; when you’re starving a country into submission while promising exiles a triumphant return, "friendly" starts to look like the world’s darkest rebrand of gunboat diplomacy.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
trump to anthropic: build my panopticon or else
Trump, pausing between threats to private companies and the Constitution, waves cheerfully on the tarmac like he didn’t just try to turn AI into a domestic surveillance and murder machine.
Trump hopped on Truth Social to announce that every federal agency must stop using Anthropic’s AI tools, because CEO Dario Amodei committed the unforgivable sin of not wanting his products used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The White House line is basically: "nice $200m Pentagon contract you’ve got there, shame if the Department of War used the Defense Production Act to turn your safety policies into toilet paper."
The administration’s new hobby is threatening companies that won’t help them algorithmically track everyone and automate killing decisions. Trump vowed to use the "Full Power of the Presidency" to impose "major civil and criminal consequences" on Anthropic if they don’t "be helpful" during the forced phase-out — a charming way of saying: obey or we criminalize you. Meanwhile, officials like Emil Michael are on X accusing Amodei of "overriding Congress" for… insisting his tools not be used for domestic spying and robot war.
Out in the real world, tech workers at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are begging their bosses not to turn cloud infrastructure into a murder-as-a-service platform, while Sam Altman — hardly a poster child for restraint — is now the guy saying he also has "red lines" against domestic surveillance and autonomous offensive weapons. When Sam Altman is the one arguing for limits and the U.S. government is rebranding the Pentagon as the Department of War and demanding "any lawful use" in a country with almost no AI laws, you don’t need an LLM to classify this as authoritarian creep.
#killing-democracy#fascism#national-security
rubio discovers 'message discipline' 20 years and one mike huckabee too late
Marco Rubio bravely attempts to impose 'message discipline' on an administration whose Iran team consists of Jared Kushner, a casino developer, and Mike Huckabee’s Old Testament cosplay.
Marco Rubio, now apparently LARPing as a serious secretary of state, has sent a cable ordering US ambassadors in the Middle East to stop saying things that might, and this is a direct quote from reality, inflame tensions or confuse people about US policy on Iran. Translation: please, for the love of God, no more Bible-based land-grab fantasies on Tucker Carlson’s podcast while we’re pretending to do diplomacy.
The memo is widely read as a subtweet of Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, who went on Tucker’s show and announced that Israel has a biblical claim to a landmass roughly the size of a mid-tier empire, then helpfully added that he’d be fine if Israel just "took it all." Arab and Muslim countries responded with the shock and horror one usually reserves for discovering your nuclear-armed negotiating partner is being advised by people whose main foreign policy credential is "once hosted a Fox show."
Back in the clown car’s front seat, Trump is "starting to get pissed" at Huckabee for stepping on his big boy Iran talks, led by his favorite real-estate failson Jared Kushner and casino developer Steve Witkoff. These two non-proliferation experts spent an evening in Geneva trying to convince Iran to permanently dismantle its nuclear sites that Trump already bombed and hand over its enriched uranium to the US, then flew home "disappointed" when Iran declined to surrender on-camera. Whether Trump orders more airstrikes now depends on whether his son-in-law and his developer buddy decide Tehran is "stalling"—a totally normal way for a superpower to make war-and-peace decisions.
Rubio is headed to Israel to meet Benjamin Netanyahu, presumably to reassure him that US policy is not, officially, "Mike Huckabee’s Book of Genesis fanfic," even though that’s what half the administration is saying on podcasts. So yes, America’s Iran strategy currently rests on: a president nursing a grudge against Huckabee’s daughter, a Bible literalist ambassador, Kushner’s vibes-based diplomacy, and a real-estate guy eyeballing nuclear facilities like they’re distressed assets. What could possibly go wrong.
#killing-democracy#imperialism#forever-grifting
detroit cops violate city law, get gofundme and federal fan club
Detroit police and Border Patrol, bravely teaming up to investigate the serious crime of not speaking English in public.
Detroit passed a clear ordinance: local cops are not supposed to play Uber for Border Patrol. So when two officers allegedly violated that law – including calling CBP on a crime victim who is now in deportation proceedings – the department initially did the unthinkable and flirted with actual accountability. There was even a 10-0 vote to suspend them without pay and talk of firing, which in American policing terms is basically a war crime.
Then the Trump ecosystem noticed. ICE jumped in on X to offer the officers jobs – "We have a place for you, patriots," because nothing says "public safety" like deporting the victim. DHS chimed in to declare them "American heroes" for flagging a "criminal illegal alien", and Michigan Republicans, including gubernatorial hopeful Mike Cox, turned the whole thing into a culture-war telethon, raising nearly $28,000 on GoFundMe so the suspended officers wouldn’t have to suffer the unbearable hardship of consequences.
Bodycam footage helpfully leaked, featuring the officers joking that the Venezuelan man might be "Pablo Escobar Jr" and telling him he "better start" speaking English because he’s "going to jail, buddy" – all while the department pretends this was about translation services in a city that already provides those. Faced with right-wing outrage, a lawsuit from a 27-year veteran, and federal agencies openly encouraging defiance of local law, Detroit’s police chief abruptly decided that, actually, termination might be a bit much and declared himself "satisfied" with the 30-day suspension. The message to immigrants is crystal clear: Detroit’s official policy may say "we’re not in the immigration business" – but if you’re not a citizen, calling the cops might just mean calling Border Patrol with extra racism and a GoFundMe on top.
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
supreme court briefly remembers bribery is bad
Trump staring at a tariff chart like it’s a wine list, trying to remember which donors paid for the good exemptions.
For the first time in what feels like several geological eras, the Supreme Court has remembered that presidents are not supposed to run the U.S. economy like a mob protection racket. By cutting back Trump’s ability to unilaterally slap tariffs on whoever hurt his feelings that morning, the court has accidentally taken a swing at the tariff-for-sale operation that’s been enriching donors, lobbyists, and, of course, the Trump family business.
Trump’s scheme was simple enough for even Peter Navarro to understand: cite the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, declare everything an emergency, and then hand out tariff exemptions like party favors to anyone who wrote a big enough check or swallowed their pride hard enough to avoid criticizing him in public. Tim Cook keeps quiet and drops $1m? Apple gets exemptions. GOP megadonor brothers? Their thermoplastic magically escapes tariffs. Elon Musk bankrolls Trump’s reelection? Tesla’s electronics glide right through. Sugar giant Florida Crystals and Reynolds American shovel millions into MAGA Inc, and suddenly foreign sugar and Chinese tobacco are the ones getting punished, not the companies buying policy like it’s on Amazon Prime.
The corruption isn’t subtle; it’s a spreadsheet. AMD gives $1m, and export controls relax. Vietnam greenlights a $1.5bn Trump golf-and-real-estate boondoggle, and—what do you know—tariffs go down and export controls disappear. Trade associations and fossil fuel companies line up with million-dollar offerings while Trump’s friends in lobbying and law firms gorge themselves on fees to secure exemptions. Big corporations, terrified of angering the thin-skinned autocrat with a tariff button, mostly skip court challenges and instead quietly kiss the ring in back rooms, demonstrating how you turn a trade law into an authoritarian loyalty test.
So yes, the Supreme Court’s decision is a rare speed bump on the golden escalator of graft. It doesn’t end the bribe-based tariff economy, but it does make it harder for Trump—or any future aspiring caudillo—to use emergency powers as a personal cash register and censorship tool. When even this court thinks you’ve gone too far with your corruption machine, you might really be overdoing it.
#corruption#killing-democracy
trump epa to americans: have you tried not living near explosions?
Firefighters bravely responding to yet another preventable inferno, brought to you by the Free Market and friends at the Trump EPA.
The Trump administration is lovingly taking a sledgehammer to the federal system designed to stop chemical plants from turning neighborhoods into real-time disaster movies. The EPA’s Risk Management Program, which covers over 12,500 high-risk facilities and was supposed to protect workers, first responders, and the people who had the bad luck to be born near a refinery, is being "streamlined" in the same way a building is "remodeled" by arson.
Industry whined in 2025 that Biden’s 2024 strengthened rules were too expensive, and the Trump EPA — stacked with former industry lobbyists, because of course it is — is now racing to kill most of those protections. They already shut down the public website that let communities and first responders know which toxic chemicals are stored nearby, because if there’s one thing this crowd hates, it’s people having information that might keep them alive. The White House is also targeting the Chemical Safety Board, the tiny agency that investigates disasters and suggests ways not to blow up the same town twice. Too effective, clearly.
This is all happening in a country that’s had a chemical accident harming humans or the environment about every other day for two decades, featuring fun highlights like a steel plant explosion in Clairton, Pennsylvania, and an oil facility blast in Louisiana that redecorated homes with crude oil from 20 miles away. Biden’s rules would have required basic stuff like leak-detection tech, fire suppression, accessible kill switches, automatic shutoffs, safer chemicals, and plans for when hurricanes hit chemical plants — you know, the thing that actually already happened at Arkema during Hurricane Harvey, when first responders were doused in toxic fumes they weren’t warned about.
The Trump EPA insists it’s "strengthening" the law by making it more "workable" for industry, keeping "core protections" while cutting "duplicative" and "unproven" requirements — which is a poetic way of saying: we’re keeping the press release and throwing out the safety measures. About 180 million people live within a few miles of these facilities, but the administration has done the math and decided that explosions are cheaper than prevention, as long as the people breathing the smoke aren’t donors.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
white christian nationalism discovers 'biology', immediately flunks it
Trump health officials bravely standing up to decades of medical research armed with a Bible, a vibes-based definition of chromosomes, and a Facebook infographic about 'biological reality'.
The Trump administration has decided that if you can’t win on facts, you can always just rewrite human biology and call it policy. HHS is finalizing a rule to block Medicaid and Medicare payments to any health system that provides gender-affirming care to people under 18, and to bar Medicaid and CHIP from covering that care at all. Major clinics like Mount Sinai, NYU Langone, Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital, and University of Utah Health are already preemptively cutting off pediatric gender care, because nothing says "pro-life" like telling trans kids their options are untreated dysphoria or the grave.
The crackdown doesn’t stop at kids. The administration has announced that trans people in prisons will be denied gender-affirming care, forced off hormones, and barred from clothing or toiletries that match their gender. The new policy insists gender identity is "disconnected from biological reality" while simultaneously redefining biology with all the rigor of a Facebook meme, renaming gender-affirming care as "sex trait modification surgery" and "sex-rejecting procedures" – language conveniently lifted from a conservative religious group. Actual scientists point out that sex and gender are complex, intersex people exist, chromosomes aren’t a neat binary, and you can’t have fully formed reproductive cells "at conception" unless you’re writing fanfic about zygotes.
Experts warn this isn’t just an attack on trans people; it’s a broader project to gut science, expertise, and bodily autonomy. The same machinery of lies can – and likely will – be pointed at abortion, vaccines, disability rights, and anything else that offends white Christian nationalist vibes. Meanwhile, CMS chief Mehmet Oz is onstage fearmongering about six-figure phalloplasties for minors that don’t actually exist, while ignoring that most teen breast surgeries are for cis kids. The message from Trump’s health bureaucracy is clear: your chromosomes, your body, and your medical decisions all belong to the state – and the state subcontracted its science homework to a church newsletter.
#killing-democracy#anti-science#trumps-america
trump makes america great again by poisoning kids for 27 coal plants
Trump, surrounded by coal helmets, proudly accepting an award for "beautiful clean coal" while quietly handing out reply-all pollution waivers like party favors.
Turns out nearly every coal plant in America could meet stricter limits on mercury, lead, and arsenic that literally prevent brain damage in children. So naturally, the Trump administration took one look at that success and decided to torch the standards anyway, because a couple dozen of the dirtiest plants in places like Wyoming, Texas, and West Virginia might have had to install filters. Can’t have kids keeping their IQ points if it inconveniences a few aging smokestacks.
The Environmental Protection Agency, now run by Lee Zeldin, helpfully declared that protecting brains, hearts, and lungs would "destroy reliable American energy" and impose "massive costs"—a fascinating conclusion given the EPA’s own prior analysis showed only 27 plants out of about 219 needed upgrades at all. Instead, Trump’s team offered coal barons the regulatory equivalent of a grocery store loyalty card: just send an email to the president for an "emergency" pollution waiver. All 71 requests were approved, some for longer than operators even asked for, including plants that admitted they already had the tech to comply.
While being ceremonially crowned "undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal" at the White House, Trump forced uneconomic coal plants to stay open, ordered the Pentagon to buy coal power, scrapped a key scientific finding that greenhouse gases harm human health, and then bragged in the State of the Union that his energy policies lowered household costs as electricity prices went up. The administration now claims that gutting Biden’s 2024 mercury rules simply restores the "highly effective" 2012 standards, which is an elegant way of saying: we know how to protect public health better, we just choose not to. Reliable energy, sure—if you don’t mind the side effect of cooked lungs and damaged brains.
#anti-science#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
flavor flav offers what trump can’t: a celebration women actually want to attend
Flavor Flav at the Olympics, somehow doing more tangible good for US women athletes than the guy with the nuclear codes and a stage-managed State of the Union.
While Donald Trump is busy turning the State of the Union into a live studio audience for his reelection reel, the US women’s Olympic hockey team has done the unthinkable: they politely declined to be used as set dressing. USA Hockey cited “logistics and travel issues,” which is sports PR for: "we have better things to do than stand behind a podium while a guy rants about his own greatness."
Into that vacuum of dignity strolls Flavor Flav, who is somehow managing to do more for women’s sports than the entire federal government. He’s partnering with MGM Resorts to throw a "She Got Game" weekend in Las Vegas to honor the women’s gold medalists and other female Olympians and Paralympians, complete with a GoFundMe to actually support the athletes instead of just yelling "you’re tremendous" into a phone from the Oval Office. One side offers a late, half-joking invite Trump admits he’d be "probably impeached" for not making; the other offers dinners, shows, and real financial backing.
Trump tried to fold the women’s team into his men’s locker-room victory call, promising, "We’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that," like they’re an afterthought he just remembered existed. Flavor Flav, by contrast, is out here putting his money, time, and extremely large clock where his mouth is, explicitly centering women’s achievements. When the choice is between a Vegas weekend designed to celebrate you and a primetime campaign prop cameo for a president who needed an impeachment joke to remember you, the decision writes itself.
#forever-grifting#trumps-america
trump eyes your voting machines like hotel mini-bars
Tulsi Gabbard pauses mid-conspiracy to pretend she’s on an important national security call and not just asking if they’ve seized the voting machines yet.
Donald Trump has discovered a fun new way to deal with elections he might lose: just have the federal government physically grab the voting machines. Fresh off the FBI’s raid on Fulton County’s election office — blessed by an affidavit built on already-debunked 2020 conspiracy theories — Trump went on Dan Bongino’s podcast to demand that Republicans “take over” voting in 15 places and “nationalize” elections. Because when you can’t win the midterms, you can always try unplugging democracy at the wall.
Enter Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the Assad-curious, Putin-adjacent conspiracy enthusiast who somehow ended up in charge of America’s spy agencies. Gabbard personally oversaw the seizure and "analysis" of Puerto Rico’s Dominion voting machines, then popped up in Fulton County like a QAnon Where’s Waldo. ODNI insists it was just looking at “cyber security practices,” not Venezuela-in-the-modem fanfic, but the pattern is obvious: use security pretexts to grab machines, sow chaos, and keep just enough doubt alive to justify more federal control.
This is all part of a larger project. Trump has already ordered GOP states to gerrymander themselves into pretzels, turned the DOJ civil rights division into an anti-voting-rights unit, and pushed an executive order to decertify voting machines, vacuum up voter data, and force passports to register — which a federal judge permanently blocked for being wildly unconstitutional. So now the same administration is ignoring the spirit of that ruling, leaning on states for voter data anyway, and pushing Congress to turn the dead order into live ammo.
As Bruce Spiva of the Campaign Legal Center helpfully translated: the FBI is seizing old ballots, Trump is calling to “nationalize” elections, DOJ is suing more than 20 states for access to private voter data, and ODNI is playing repo man with voting machines. Totally normal behavior for a government that definitely plans to accept losing power gracefully. What could possibly go wrong with the president’s allies test-driving election interference on a disenfranchised US territory before rolling it out nationwide?
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
texas gop chooses between 99% loyalist and alleged criminal, calls it a primary
Ken Paxton and John Cornyn competing to prove who loves Trump more, while Texas voters are asked to pick between "totally captured" and "possibly felon-adjacent."
Texas Republicans are having a very normal, healthy internal debate: should their Senate nominee be John Cornyn, who brags that he votes with Trump 99% of the time, or Ken Paxton, the state attorney general who was impeached on bribery and corruption charges, survived thanks to friendly senators, and is now being marketed as a persecuted MAGA folk hero? For variety, there’s also Rep. Wesley Hunt, who is pitching himself as a "bridge" to the next generation of Trumpism, because apparently what this country needs is more structurally unsound infrastructure.
Cornyn has spent nearly $70 million trying to convince primary voters that he’s sufficiently Trumpy, airing ads touting his border hawkery and his near-perfect record of obedience. His problem? He once briefly suggested that maybe Trump’s time had passed and that the classified documents charges were "very serious" — unforgivable sins in a party where the only crime is acknowledging crimes. Paxton, meanwhile, shrugs off his impeachment, divorce "on biblical grounds," and assorted scandals while his supporters insist he’s just like Trump, which, distressingly, is not meant as an indictment.
Trump, ever the chaos connoisseur, is staying "neutral" and says he supports all three, because why pick one when you can own the entire moral collapse? Cornyn warns that nominating Paxton could cost Republicans the seat and other Texas battlegrounds, while the base wonders why they should settle for a mere 99% loyalist when they can have a man whose defining qualification is being too ethically radioactive for even Texas Republicans to fully launder. The GOP’s transformation is complete: policy is background noise, and the real contest is who can crawl the farthest into Trump’s shadow while pretending it’s sunlight.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
america first, africans last: trump turns health aid into a mining and biopiracy racket
A 10-year-old girl gets an HPV shot while the Trump administration tries to turn her medical data and future vaccines into tradable assets on the great American extraction market.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in "global health": treating African countries like a combo mining concession and free biotech incubator. Under its America First global health strategy (subtitle: pay up or die), Washington is dangling billions in health funding in front of at least 17 African nations while demanding access to sensitive patient data, pathogen samples, and even mining deals in return. Zimbabwe took one look at a $350m offer that required handing over biological resources and data with no guarantee of access to any resulting vaccines or treatments and decided, shockingly, that selling its sovereignty for store credit at the US pharma mall was a bad idea.
Zambia, meanwhile, is being strong-armed into a health-for-minerals trade, with advocates accusing the US of "conditioning life-saving health services on plundering the mineral wealth of the country"—a sentence that would sound over-the-top if it weren't just a straight description of US policy. Other countries are pushed to rely on US regulators for drug approvals, prioritize US-friendly faith-based providers, and share patient records so generously you'd think HIPAA was classified as foreign propaganda. All this is happening after Trump gutted USAID and bailed on the WHO, then rushed in with bilateral deals that conveniently sidestep global fairness rules in favor of privatized extraction.
When Zimbabwe balked, the US ambassador politely threatened to start shutting down health programs for 1.2 million people on HIV treatment, framing it as a "difficult and regrettable" administrative chore rather than "we tried to strip-mine your data and pathogens and you said no, so now your sick people are leverage." Development aid, which was once at least pretending to be about partnership, has been rebranded as a loyalty program where the points are human lives and the rewards are more power for US corporations. America First turns out to mean everyone else gets to choose between exploitation and abandonment.
#imperialism#forever-grifting
trump liberates cuba from electricity, food, and oil
Nothing says 21st-century foreign policy like forcing a country back to Che-era cooking methods and calling it 'support for the Cuban people.'
Remember when the Cuban Revolution museum showed dirt floors, firewood stoves, and grinding pre-1959 poverty as the bad old days? Trump looked at that exhibit and apparently said: "Reboot it."
While Lisandra Botey in Havana sends her nine-year-old to school on an empty stomach and cooks with driftwood like it's 1958, Washington has helpfully "taken full control" of Venezuela's oil industry after US troops yanked Nicolás Maduro out of power on 3 January. The result: crude shipments to Cuba collapse, gas disappears, and families go back to smoke, charcoal, and guess-what’s-for-dinner-(nothing) as daily routine.
Not content with decades of embargo, President Art of the Deal has now threatened tariffs on any country that dares sell oil to the island, effectively turning access to fuel into a White House permission slip. Then, with the subtlety of a protection racket, the US Treasury announces it might "relax restrictions" on a limited number of oil sales to "support the Cuban people"—you know, after helping cut off their existing lifeline and watching the lights go out.
So the Cuban government gets to keep its creaky one-party state, ordinary Cubans get blackouts and hunger, and Trump gets to cosplay Cold War overlord while holding an entire country's energy supply at gunpoint. Democracy isn’t on the march, but the embargo sure is.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
