Monday, October 5, 2026
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a sternly worded letter basically asking: could you please stop telling Americans your product might kill them while you’re trying to sell it to them? The Trump ally scolded Amodei for "panic-inducing commentary" about AI extinction risk right as Anthropic is heading for a nearly $2 trillion IPO, because nothing irritates a Republican donor class quite like a tech CEO accidentally telling the truth before the retail investors are fully fleeced.
Instead of worrying about, say, whether a company that thinks its own product could end civilization should be allowed to hoover up grandma’s 401(k), Moreno accuses Amodei of wanting to "wreak havoc" on the great public "super intelligence" discourse — adopting Trump’s new branding, because of course this White House thinks it can rebrand intelligence like a failing casino. He gently suggests Anthropic spend more time talking about how AI can protect us, supercharge national security, and help America "beat China," a magic phrase that in this administration roughly translates to: shut up about the dangers and focus on the weapons contracts.
Meanwhile, AI/data center backlash is turning into a midterm campaign issue in Ohio, where Sen. Jon Husted is getting hammered by ads calling him Mr. Data Center. So Moreno’s message to Anthropic doubles as a campaign memo: keep the stock price high, keep the voters calm, and for the love of Trump, stop telling people the miracle technology we’re deregulating into oblivion might actually be dangerous. Regulatory oversight? No, no — what we have here is narrative oversight.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer climbed onto a donor-funded campaign plane and said the quiet part directly into an Axios recorder: elections are a "business," districts are line items, and party cash goes only where it gets the "biggest return." Representation, but make it private equity. If your district can’t hit its quarterly performance targets for the GOP, congratulations, you’re getting written off like a bad WeWork investment.
Emmer is proudly vowing not to repeat the 2022 mistake of trying to represent too many people, choosing instead to abandon any race that looks remotely difficult and shovel money into the ones that pollsters say are salvageable. The message to voters in those other districts is clear: you’re not citizens, you’re a sunk cost. Meanwhile, he’s scolding Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar for daring to air an ad saying Trump’s immigration crackdown has "gone too far"—then half-walking it back with a condescending "she knows her district," as long as her district remembers who the real boss is.
The whole thing is a neat little case study in how the modern GOP sees Congress: not as a representative body, but as a portfolio to be optimized. Districts aren’t communities, they’re assets; voters aren’t people, they’re yield. And if you’re not producing a high enough partisan return, don’t worry—the whip has already updated the spreadsheet and moved your democracy dollars somewhere more "efficient." Shareholder value, but for authoritarian vibes.
Supreme Court building hero shot, also known as the world’s fanciest venue for pretending precedent still matters.
Chuck Schumer has announced that if Democrats take the Senate, they are not planning to rubber-stamp any more of Trump’s “MAGA justices” — a phrase that here means “political operatives in robes who pretend not to have heard of the 2020 election.” After nearly six years of Trump judges being shot out of a GOP Senate like a T-shirt cannon at an authoritarian pep rally, Democrats are daring to suggest that maybe, just maybe, the guy who tried to overturn an election doesn’t get automatic lifetime control over the courts too.
Richard Blumenthal politely notes the odds of confirming a Trump Supreme Court pick under a Democratic majority are “slim to none,” which is Washington-speak for “absolutely not, have you seen these people?” Ruben Gallego goes a step further and says the quiet part out loud: they should do to Trump what Mitch McConnell did to Obama — sit on a vacancy and wait for a president who isn’t actively trying to burn down democracy. Republicans, naturally, are outraged that Democrats might use the exact power Republicans lovingly sharpened for a decade.
Sen. Darline Graham warns that if Democrats win the Senate, they’ll block Trump’s nominee “regardless of their qualifications,” which is rich coming from the party that treated ‘thinks the president is above the law’ as a résumé booster. Meanwhile, Blumenthal suggests a wild new litmus test for judicial nominees: correctly answering who won the 2020 election — a question that has already turned multiple Trump picks into constitutional deer in headlights. Mazie Hirono, for her part, just laughs and endorses term limits, because if we’re going to have a captured court, it should at least rotate the captors.
So the stakes of 2026 are clear: a Republican Senate means Trump keeps stacking the judiciary with loyalists who think Article II lets him do whatever he wants; a Democratic Senate means the judicial conveyor belt finally jams. Call it gridlock, call it payback — but after McConnell’s decade-long project to turn the courts into a Federalist Society fanfic, this is less a “judicial war” than Democrats belatedly showing up to a knife fight where the other side has already been swinging chainsaws.
The Trump economic team has finally cracked the code: you can’t just tell people they’re thriving while they’re checking out at Walmart and wondering if they can afford milk and rent this month. Top White House economist Kevin Hassett went on CNN to explain his delicate task: brag about the "great" economy without sounding like a sociopath to people who watched their purchasing power get steamrolled. So far, the strategy appears to be: insist the numbers are beautiful, acknowledge the pain, then go right back to the numbers.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is out here playing ER doctor and Vegas pit boss at the same time. On one hand, he admits Americans got flattened by an "inflation Mack Truck" and that merely keeping up with prices now doesn’t undo years of damage. On the other, he wants full credit for the "strong" economy and shrugs off surging mortgage rates and bond yields as a global thing, not, you know, anything to do with Trump’s tariffs, budget cuts, or his little war project. He even proudly repeats his line that "I am the house now" on Wall Street, which is a bold way of saying the guy in charge of Treasury sees the economy as a casino where he’s dealing the cards and your 401(k) is the chips.
Meanwhile, former Biden economist Jared Bernstein points out the obvious: Team Biden talked past people by cheerleading GDP while folks were drowning in bills; Team Trump is talking past them by pretending the affordability crisis is a "hoax" while actively making it worse. So we’ve gone from "we know you’re struggling, but look at this jobs report" to "you’re not struggling, and if you are, the spreadsheet disagrees." The administration’s big innovation is to admit they can’t control the bond market, but they can ask everyone to "slow down and think" as interest rates and prices do the exact opposite. Strong economy on paper, weak reality in people’s wallets — a perfect metaphor for an administration that treats lived experience as a messaging problem and economic pain as a PR glitch.
Ken Paxton explains how he’s totally his own man while tugging gently at the strings attached to his limbs.
Ken Paxton, the Trump-blessed Texas attorney general best known for alleged bribery, abuse of public trust, and a marriage dissolved on "biblical grounds," has now confessed that his Senate campaign isn’t really his. At a fundraiser, Paxton told donors he’s “never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign” and that the issues are all coming “from D.C.” Translation: the guy who wants to be a United States senator is basically forwarding whatever emails the national GOP and Trumpworld Super PACs send him.
Pressed on this extremely honest oopsie, his adviser Nick Maddux rushed out to say that campaigns don’t coordinate with Super PACs and that this is all totally normal and legal and definitely not a grotesque parody of representative government. Paxton, we’re told, is bravely “taking his message directly to the people” via a statewide TV buy—presumably the same “message” he just admitted he doesn’t control. Democracy: now available in pre-packaged, DC-approved talking points.
Meanwhile, polls show Paxton trailing Democrat James Talarico by a few points, even in Texas, despite Trump personally selecting him like a defective product off the MAGA shelf. Paxton has already admitted that Trump’s midterm convention cratered his numbers, a remark his team quickly dubbed “manipulated nonsense” because nothing says strength like publicly contradicting your own candidate’s words. So to recap: a scandal-ridden AG, handpicked by Trump, run by shadowy DC interests, tanked by Trump’s own convention, insisting he’s the voice of Texas. Flawless operation.
Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s former White House press secretary, is "switching" careers by moving from the taxpayer-funded propaganda desk to the privately funded propaganda desk at Fox News. Truly a bold pivot: same talking points, different makeup chair.
She’ll join the ever-expanding on‑air reunion of ex‑Trump officials who somehow keep failing upward into cushy media gigs, ensuring that the network remains a closed‑loop ecosystem where the people who spun the lies in government now get paid to justify those lies on TV. State TV, but with ad breaks.
Instead of any accountability for years of gaslighting the public, Leavitt gets a contributor contract and a platform to help launder whatever the next round of executive overreach, grift, or constitutional demolition looks like. The press corps is dead; long live the press corpse on cable.
Trump, mid-rally, explaining why his taxpayer-funded TV commercial is definitely not a campaign ad, it just happens to air right before the midterms and praise Republicans by name.
Donald Trump is out "rallying" for Republicans ahead of the midterms, which in practice means the White House rolling out glossy, taxpayer-funded TV ads that just coincidentally look a lot like campaign commercials. The message: the economy is incredible, the country is thriving, and all of this will continue as long as you keep electing the people who keep flattering him on TV. Governance as a public service has been replaced by governance as a permanent re-election tour.
The spots are packaged as official presidential communications, but their timing and content are pure campaign propaganda — paid for by everyone, including the voters they're trying to drown in spin. What used to be an ethics line is now a speed bump, and the administration has hit it at 90 mph. Why bother raising money and following campaign laws when you can just rebrand government messaging as an infomercial for your friends?
State media usually takes a few decades to develop; Trumpworld is just fast-tracking it. The president gets wall-to-wall coverage, Republican candidates ride the free airtime, and the public underwrites the whole thing. If you were wondering when the line between governing and campaigning would finally disappear, congratulations: you’re watching the pilot episode of the "Forever Election" channel — brought to you by the United States government.
Trump explains that trade deficits are just ‘fancy losses’ while standing in front of an economy he’s actively trying to set on fire.
Trump hopped on Truth Social to announce that AI doesn’t need guardrails because it already has the ultimate safeguard: a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”—which is an interesting way to describe the guy who then threatened to cut off all trade with any country the U.S. runs a deficit with if the Fed doesn’t slash interest rates. Yes, the president basically said he’d blow up global supply chains and U.S. manufacturing because Jerome Powell won’t give him 1% money and a cookie.
He followed that up with the claim that if America stopped trading with every deficit country (so, almost everyone), we’d somehow "make" $1.5 trillion a year, because in his brain "deficit" is just a fancy word for LOSS. Under this kindergarten math, Americans importing $1bn in French wine while exporting $1bn less in bourbon isn’t a trade pattern, it’s us mailing France a giant sack of cash and crying. Economists pointed out that this is deranged, but Trump is too busy promising 14–20% GDP growth if the Fed just detonates price stability on command.
Meanwhile, he’s bullying the Fed to slash rates to 1% while inflation is still a problem, then bragging he’d deliver miracle growth numbers the U.S. hasn’t seen outside of the weird statistical whiplash of the 2020 pandemic collapse-and-reopen quarter. The same "very stable genius" who vowed to lower prices on day one has now managed higher prices, slower growth, and a standing threat to tank farmers, manufacturers, and homebuilders by nuking trade with China, Mexico, Taiwan, and the EU. Congressional Republicans, naturally, are either cheering this on or staring at their shoes while he test-drives economic policy like a drunk in a demolition derby.
House Democrats are lawyering up like it’s the series finale of democracy, scrambling to assemble legal strategies in case the Trump administration tries to kneecap the midterms. Trump, a man who thinks Article II lets him do whatever he wants, is now pushing for a "greater federal role" in elections and new limits on a process that’s, minor detail, traditionally run by states. When the guy who tried to overturn the last election suddenly wants more control over this one, that’s not a red flag, that’s a five-alarm fire.
Rather than trust the federal government currently run by a man who treats the Justice Department like his personal law firm, Democrats are prepping lawsuits, emergency motions, and every procedural wrench they can throw into the authoritarian gears. They’re gaming out scenarios where Trump meddles with mail-in ballots, deploys federal agencies as partisan enforcers, or tries to "reinterpret" election law on the fly. The plan, such as it is, is to make it legally annoying enough that even this administration might think twice before openly torching what’s left of free and fair elections.
So the 2026 midterms are shaping up great: one party trying to get people to vote, the other party trying to get more control over which votes count. What could possibly go wrong?
Mark Ruffalo, apparently tired of only fighting fictional genocidal maniacs, showed up at a "Hands Off Our Vote" event in New York City to call out Trump and Republicans for their ongoing obsession with making it harder for people to vote by mail. Trump is again trying to kneecap mail-in voting ahead of the midterms, because if there's one thing this movement fears more than immigrants or windmills, it's a high turnout election.
Ruffalo told the crowd he’s ready to "Hulk out" to stop the GOP from choking off access to the ballot, while Republicans keep role‑playing as the party of "freedom" by making sure that freedom doesn’t extend to actually voting. Nothing says confidence in your ideas like a constant, panicked effort to keep people from safely casting a ballot.
So the White House gets voter suppression, the RNC gets another excuse to fundraise off imaginary fraud, and the rest of us get the surreal experience of relying on the MCU to defend basic democratic rights. Phase 5: Democracy, now only available in extended universe cameos.
Trump, explaining the booming economy to people who just took out a second mortgage to buy cereal.
Turns out when you run the country like a discount casino, the house still wins—but it’s Kroger and Exxon, not the people who voted for you. A new CBS News poll finds 66% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, with 70% saying his policies are driving up food and grocery costs. That’s not just “the elites” or “the coastal media”; that’s everyone standing in the frozen aisle doing mental math and deciding which kid doesn’t get yogurt this week.
Meanwhile, 64% of respondents say the war in Iran is sending oil and gas prices into orbit, and Trump’s response is to fly to Ohio and demand more loyalty from Republicans like a guy asking for Yelp five-stars while actively setting the restaurant on fire. Instead of addressing corporate price-gouging, supply manipulation, or the basic concept of wages not keeping up with inflation, the White House strategy appears to be: hold a rally, yell about enemies, and hope nobody notices the $6 eggs.
So while Trump brags about a “strong economy” on stage, the actual economy for normal people is them paying more for groceries, more at the pump, and getting lectured that this is what winning looks like. The poll suggests Americans have finally decoded the message: the only ones really “winning” are the people cashing in on chaos—and they’re not shopping in the same stores as everyone else.
Sen. Thom Tillis, proudly displaying a Jan. 6 plaque while explaining how he just realized maybe handing unlimited power to the guy who inspired the riot was a bad call.
Sen. Thom Tillis is shuffling off the Senate stage and, now that he no longer needs the base, has discovered that checks and balances are good, actually. On "60 Minutes," Tillis warns that without Congress acting like a co-equal branch instead of a fan club, "we will have a sort of dictator king if we're not careful"—a bold stance from the man who spent years carefully voting to hand the scepter over. He even wrote a book, "How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents," because nothing says constitutional crisis like monetizing it with a quirky title.
Tillis complains that four administrations have escalated executive power, but reserves special horror for Trump 2.0 and his entourage of "sycophants." He blasts the president’s obsession with ruling by executive order and admits the obvious: Congress keeps giving power away when "their guy" is in office, then acts shocked when the presidency turns into a job opening for aspiring caudillos. Having helped confirm the entire second-term cabinet—including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whom he now wants fired—Tillis has decided, very bravely and very late, that maybe putting Fox News cosplay generals and Kristi "Everybody’s a Terrorist" Noem in charge of things was not the high point of American governance.
After Trump threatened to primary him for opposing the One Big Beautiful Bill that would shove low-income North Carolinians off Medicaid, Tillis chose retirement over a MAGA loyalty trial. He now trashes Hegseth’s Iran adventurism and calls Noem and Hegseth "poster children" for people who should never have had that kind of power—conveniently skipping over the part where he helped give it to them. He still insists he "respects the president" and wants him to succeed, while publicly documenting his profanity-laced texts with Trump and begging his colleagues to stop sleepwalking toward monarchy. America’s constitutional guardrails are now officially: a plaque for Jan. 6 police, a retiring senator’s regret tour, and whatever’s left of the separation of powers after two Trump terms and a Senate that keeps discovering its spine on the way out the door.
Sunday, October 4, 2026
Ah yes, the traditional White House hiring photo: Christmas tree, AR-style rifle, and a shirt telling the previous president to get fucked. Very "West Wing" energy.
The Trump White House has decided that if you're going to destroy the concept of an independent press, you might as well do it with some festive gun cosplay. Enter Beni Rae Harmony, the brand-new assistant White House press secretary, previously best known for posing with a rifle in front of Christmas decorations while wearing a "Fuck Joe Biden" T-shirt. Because nothing says "professional communicator for the presidency" like a holiday card that doubles as a Proud Boys recruitment flyer.
Harmony’s résumé reads like a casting call for a Steve Bannon cinematic universe: producer for Turning Point USA’s Jack Posobiec, crisis comms flack for Paul "anime snuff film" Gosar and Matt "under federal investigation" Gaetz, and campaign aide to a far-right House candidate who proudly posted her rifle glamour shot. She also loudly defended Gosar after he was censured for a video depicting him murdering Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking Biden, which in this administration is apparently not a red flag but an HR recommendation letter.
The White House, via deputy press secretary Anna Kelly, praised Harmony as a "trusted voice for the MAGA movement" who was ostensibly a "White House correspondent" for Steve Bannon’s propaganda outlet Real America’s Voice right up until Trump seems to have been literally holding her résumé on Air Force One while she lobbed him pre-scripted softball questions. So yes, the person now paid by taxpayers to brief the press was just pretending to be press while auditioning for state media.
This all slots neatly into Trump’s broader project of turning the briefing room into a loyalty pageant. CNN, Politico, and MS Now are being shoved toward the exit for insufficient worship, while carefully curated sycophants get called on to ask questions like why Volodymyr Zelenskyy doesn’t dress fancy enough for Dear Leader’s office. The message is clear: real journalists get banned, rifle-in-a-"Fuck Joe Biden"-shirt influencers get badges and a White House email. Freedom of the press, now available exclusively to people who would happily end it.
Republicans are so confident in deep-red Nebraska that they’ve called in the one man who inspires maximum confidence in close races: Donald J. Trump, patron saint of losing statewide elections. Sen. Pete Ricketts is supposedly cruising toward re‑election, yet the party is panicking hard enough to deploy Trump for a midterm rally against independent Dan Osborn, who’s backed by Democrats desperate to keep one more rubber stamp out of Mitch McConnell’s pocket.
What should be a sleepy coronation for a Republican incumbent has turned into a MAGA intervention, as the party once again bets that the guy who helped cough up the Senate in 2020 and 2022 will somehow save them in 2026. Instead of, say, persuading voters with policy, the GOP is leaning on the usual strategy: fly Trump in, scream about Democrats, reality, and whoever counted the last election, and pray the base shows up to preserve the filibuster and keep the Senate safe for judges who think the 19th century was a little too progressive.
So the red-state “midterm blitz” is less about Nebraska and more about shoring up the Senate firewall for the next round of court-packing, voting restrictions, and "independent" state legislatures that mysteriously always side with Republicans. The message from the GOP is clear: if there’s even a whiff of competitive democracy, Trump must be air‑dropped in to smother it with rallies, grievance, and merch sales.
The Trump White House says it is "aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options" after a researcher at a Russian anti-plague facility broke a test tube of pneumonic plague, got severe pneumonia, and then died. So yes, a potentially lethal pathogen may have escaped containment in Russia, and the same crew that brought you bleach injections and "it's just going to disappear" is now in charge of the U.S. response. Sleep tight.
Russian officials insist everything is fine, call it "pneumonia of unknown etiology," and say nearly 200 exposed people are under observation but totally healthy, promise. The epidemiological situation is "stable," which is exactly what you say when it isn't. Meanwhile, the White House punts all questions to the State Department, which heroically responds by not responding at all. When it comes to possible plague, the international strategy appears to be: shrug emoji but classified.
So we have Russia, famous for transparent public health reporting, and Trump, famous for not lying about pandemics ever, both telling us not to worry. If you were looking for a scenario that screams "we've learned absolutely nothing from COVID," congratulations, you've unlocked the bonus level.
Having already tried "witch hunt," "perfect call," and "I hardly know the guy," Donald Trump has now moved on to the advanced propaganda stage: declaring Barack Obama, not Richard Watergate Nixon, the "most corrupt" president in U.S. history via a Truth Social meme. Yes, we’ve reached the part of the movie where the man impeached twice, found liable for sexual abuse, civil fraud, and hoarding classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago ballroom is doing historical rankings of presidential corruption like he’s C-SPAN’s drunk cousin.
Trump blasted out a split-screen of Obama and Nixon’s portraits with the caption, "One of these men is the most corrupt president in the history of our country." Subtlety, as always, is for losers. The goal isn’t accuracy; it’s to pound the lie so often that his followers forget that he is the one whose administration had cabinet secretaries dropping like flies under ethics investigations and whose inner circle treated federal indictments like loyalty badges.
The strategy is familiar: accuse your enemies of the things you’re most guilty of, hope the press treats it as just another "both sides" spat, and rely on your base to share the meme instead of the indictment list. Nixon at least had the dignity to be ashamed of getting caught. Trump is out here trying to rebrand corruption as a transferable asset he can just slap on whoever’s polling better with independents.
So the man who tried to overturn an election, leaned on foreign governments for dirt, and turned the federal government into a family rewards program is now grading past presidents on integrity via low-res memes. American democracy: now with user-generated fact-checking courtesy of the guy who demanded loyalty oaths from the FBI director.
Rahm Emanuel, seen here explaining that the best way to deal with a lawless president is a fresh set of guidelines he’ll ignore by lunchtime.
Rahm Emanuel went on “Meet the Press” to bravely announce that if Democrats win the House, they should absolutely not use the one constitutional tool designed for a president who treats the law like a Yelp suggestion. Instead, he says they should pass an ethics package to address all the corruption he fully admits is happening. Because when you’ve got a twice-impeached, serially indicted coup-curious ex-president back in office, what you really need is a new brochure about rules.
Rather than talk about whether a man already impeached for extorting Ukraine and inciting an insurrection maybe shouldn’t be allowed to keep speed‑running the Constitution, Rahm warns impeachment would just be a "food fight" and make Washington look like "Disneyland on the Potomac." Bold strategy: confirm the town is a cartoon by refusing to use any of the grown-up powers it has. His plan is to "use investigations" to "deliver change"—so, lots of hearings, lots of stern faces, and then a bill lobbyists will lovingly strangle in its crib.
Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries is doing the careful dance of "we haven’t ruled anything in or out" while insisting the focus is affordability, and Jamie Raskin quietly reminds everyone that impeachment exists for exactly this scenario: "a president acting like a king, an imperious, lawless, arrogant king." But the prevailing centrist wisdom seems to be: when faced with a lawless monarch, don’t remove him—just ask him nicely to sign a tougher ethics code and hope he doesn’t set it on fire during his next rally.
Also lurking in the background: Rahm is very likely eyeing a 2028 presidential run, so this whole "no impeachment, just vibes and reform" routine doubles as an audition tape for donors who want Trumpism without the riots, and accountability without the consequences. Disneyland on the Potomac is starting to sound generous; at least Disneyland has functioning security and a code of conduct they actually enforce.
JD Vance and RFK Jr, bravely standing up to Big Pharma by selling $300,000 access packages to federal health regulators.
JD Vance, current vice-president and 2028 presidential hopeful, has decided that if you’re going to cosplay as Trump’s heir, you might as well do the whole pay-to-play health cult package. So he’s latching onto Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again (Maha) operation, a movement that started as a chaotic mash-up of anti-vaxxers, supplement junkies and wellness cranks and has now matured into what it was always destined to be: a corporate-sponsored influence bazaar with a side of immigrant-bashing.
At the Maha summit in DC, Vance bantered onstage with RFK Jr about carnivore diets and memes, then pivoted to claiming he’s uncovered $250bn in health-care fraud, which—shockingly—he blames on immigrants, including undocumented people supposedly getting Medicare despite there being no evidence of that. The administration has released almost no details about who’s being kicked off Medicaid, Medicare, and ACA plans, but don’t worry, Vance swears it’s all just hardworking anti-fraud heroism and not a massive purge of vulnerable people dressed up as border security.
Meanwhile, Maha itself has evolved from “grassroots health movement” to corporate VIP lounge. UnitedHealth, Walmart, Anthropic, and especially Grail—a cancer-treatment company currently awaiting FDA approval—lined up as top sponsors. For the low, low price of $300,000, companies could buy speaking slots and a private dinner with RFK Jr and CMS chief Mehmet Oz, which ethics experts describe as a "giant conflict of interest" and everyone else recognizes as government access menu-priced like a steakhouse. Maha members fork over $6,000 a year to a holding company whose sole board member is Kennedy’s 29-year-old son, while RFK Jr himself has pocketed $4m from Maha-linked ventures. Very healthy—for the Kennedys.
Even Maha’s original conspiracy set is noticing the scam. Anti-vax doctors and wellness influencers are whining on X and Substack that their brave movement against Big Pharma has been "captured" by, well, Big Everything—corporations with active business before the agencies run by the same guys headlining the summit. Kennedy, once a loud critic of corporate power, spent his time praising OpenAI and telling the crowd that doctors would be committing malpractice if they didn’t check AI first, citing Sam Altman like a scripture verse. JD Vance, for his part, is clearly betting that aligning himself with this wellness-flavored influence racket—and its donor pipelines—will buy him a 2028 runway, even as Maha’s rural base reports Trump’s health policies have done little or nothing for them. The grift is thriving; the health part, not so much.
Jay Clayton politely pretending "Super Intelligence Force" sounds like policy and not a Fox News graphic Trump invented on the toilet.
Donald Trump has decided that the person who already runs America’s 18 intelligence agencies, Jay Clayton, should also moonlight as the White House AI czar, because nothing says "careful governance of civilization-altering technology" like giving your spy chief a second full-time job. Clayton will lead Trump’s gloriously named "Super Intelligence Force (SIF)", which sounds less like a regulatory body and more like an off-brand Marvel franchise designed by a guy who thinks spellcheck is woke.
Instead of building an independent, accountable structure to oversee AI, the White House is just stapling AI policy onto the intelligence apparatus and calling it a day. Trump insists AI must be pushed forward at full speed to "beat China", while he waves away those pesky "AI godfathers" warning this might be how you accidentally speedrun to Skynet. To calm everyone down, he’s created a committee, signed a vaguely spelled "AI accord" with six tech executives, and promised a "High IQ" czar — which, naturally, translated into yet another loyalist with a history of helping Wall Street and Trumpworld avoid consequences.
Previously, the AI and crypto czar gig was held by venture capitalist David Sacks, who spent his limited government-employee hours straddling the line between "public service" and "industry concierge" before timing out and drifting back to the private sector while still co-chairing the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Now Clayton, fresh off running intelligence and having chaired the SEC during Trump’s first-term deregulatory bonanza, will "coordinate" between government, religious groups, infrastructure, and "super intelligence companies" — a phrase that should absolutely not be uttered by an administration this allergic to oversight. The surveillance state and the AI gold rush are now sharing a boss; what could possibly go wrong?
Trump explains that a 50% tariff on Canadian dairy, alcohol, and cars will totally help American families — right after they finish paying 50% more for groceries, beer, and minivans.
Trump has decided the real threat to America isn’t Russian cyberattacks, climate disasters, or domestic extremists — it’s Canadian cheese, whiskey, and SUVs. So he’s slamming a 50% tariff on dairy, alcohol, and cars from Canada, because if there’s one thing this administration excels at, it’s making everything more expensive for Americans while calling it a “big win.”
Instead of a coherent trade policy, we get the economic equivalent of drunk dialing Ottawa at 3 a.m. and threatening to burn down the Tim Hortons. U.S. consumers will pay more for milk, pay more for their weekend booze, and pay more for cars, all so Trump can cosplay tariff strongman on TV and brag about “standing up to Canada” — a country whose most aggressive export to date has been Celine Dion.
The White House will now spin this as a masterstroke of negotiation, where wrecking supply chains and jacking up prices during an already fragile economy is somehow genius 5D chess. Meanwhile, American farmers, automakers, and retailers get to enjoy the part where Canada retaliates and their own exports get kneecapped. MAGA means More Added Gouging, Americans.
