Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Trump unveils an A.I.-powered government site, because if there’s one thing this administration needed, it’s an automated way to misdirect you about your federal benefits.
Trump gathered the A.I. overlords at the White House, called them “very brilliant,” and then did what any strong, decisive leader would do when faced with a world-altering technology that can supercharge propaganda, fraud, and surveillance: he asked the billionaires to regulate themselves and sign a voluntary safety pledge. No laws, no enforcement, just a Truth Social post and a handshake agreement that they’ll totally, definitely be nice this time.
Instead of using the actual powers of the presidency, Trump declared the deal “morally binding” and proudly announced that the companies will “police each other,” which is exactly how we got the financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and Facebook. Speaker Mike Johnson and Vice President J.D. Vance cheered from the sidelines, warning that real safeguards might hurt “competitiveness” — translation: shareholders might have to wait a whole extra quarter before buying their third superyacht.
To prove how serious he is about the future of humanity, Trump also strong-armed the assembled executives into rebranding artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” because nothing says responsible governance like focus-grouping the apocalypse. The end result: Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and friends walk away with zero binding constraints, Trump gets a new buzzword, and the American public gets to find out in real time what happens when the government replaces regulation with vibes.
Qatar flew in with a neat little two-page compromise to keep the U.S. and Iran from stumbling back into a war, and Washington briefly pretended to be a serious country again. U.S. officials told reporters the talks were "positive and constructive," Iran was "flexible," and Trump might even trade sanctions relief and frozen funds for actual nuclear limits. You know, basic diplomacy, the sort of thing adults do.
Then a few hours later, while the Qatari team was still in the White House, Trump hopped on Truth Social to announce that he had offered Iran nothing. So the official U.S. position is: we will make concessions, unless the TV is on, at which point we absolutely will not, but also maybe, depending on the next push notification. Iran calls Trump "incapable of making a decision" and says he’s stuck in a quagmire where he can neither negotiate nor fight, which is a polite diplomatic way of saying, "this guy governs like a malfunctioning slot machine."
The talks, shockingly, went nowhere. Iran wants the U.S. naval blockade lifted and a return to a June memorandum of understanding; the U.S. thinks it’s "winning" and therefore doesn’t need to compromise, because nothing says responsible nuclear brinkmanship like treating war and peace as a midterm messaging strategy. U.S. officials now think Trump could restart major combat operations after the elections, because apparently the real "October surprise" is whether the president will launch another Middle East war to juice his poll numbers. But don’t worry, he assures us: "Iran will not have a nuclear weapon"—he’ll just keep gambling with one.
The Pentagon just handed Boeing more than $20 billion to build the Navy’s next fighter jet after a "clandestine" years-long competition, because nothing says transparent democracy like a multi-decade weapons system chosen in a process that sounds like it was run out of a speakeasy. Lockheed was dumped earlier, Northrop Grumman lost this round, and Boeing walked away with the prize: a sixth‑generation warplane that, minor detail, no one is really allowed to describe in public beyond the usual salad of "advanced sensors" and "advanced lethality."
This jackpot arrives on top of Boeing already building the Air Force’s F‑47, previously rolled out in an Oval Office show-and-tell starring President Trump and Fox News lawn gnome–turned–Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. After months of infighting between the White House, Pentagon, Congress, and industry, the great policy breakthrough appears to be: give Boeing even more money and call it "naval air dominance." Lawmakers get their home‑district jobs, admirals get their shiny PowerPoint jets, Trump gets another backdrop for campaign B‑roll, and taxpayers get the honor of underwriting a classified boondoggle they’re not allowed to see.
Former Navy Secretary John Phelan assured everyone the program was “not dead,” which in Pentagon-speak means it’s too stuffed with contractor cash and future consulting gigs to ever be allowed to die. Meanwhile, the Navy brass solemnly testify that they "must" have the most advanced strike fighters on Earth, as if there were any chance the answer was going to be, "actually we’re good, let’s spend that $20B on, say, health care or infrastructure." The Trump-era defense state keeps humming along: eternal war planning, infinite procurement, and a military-industrial complex that never met a trillion it couldn’t turn into a patriotic PowerPoint.
Trump, moments after discovering that calling a jury verdict a ‘hoax’ does not, in fact, reverse the bank transfer.
Donald Trump has bravely decided to stop fighting in court over the $5m E Jean Carroll already has in her bank account, marking a major legal breakthrough in the field of giving up on money that’s gone. After years of calling Carroll a liar, losing a civil trial for sexual abuse and defamation, losing the appeal, losing the stay, and watching the $5.8m (with interest!) walk out the door in July, Trump has now informed the second circuit that, actually, he’s done pretending this particular ship hasn’t sunk.
The second circuit filed the legal equivalent of an eye roll, formally dismissing his appeal and deeming his stay motion withdrawn. As former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani helpfully translated, this is the “final nail in the coffin” for Trump’s dreams of clawing back the cash from the woman a jury found he sexually abused and defamed. The Supreme Court already refused—twice—to rescue him from this verdict, but Trump’s lawyers still managed to burn a few more billable hours insisting gravity is optional.
Trump’s team, naturally, responded by declaring total victory. In a statement that reads like it was ghostwritten by a caps-lock key, they insisted “The American People stand with President Trump” against the “Carroll Hoaxes” and promised he will “keep winning against Liberal Lawfare.” Yes, nothing screams “winning” quite like permanently losing $5.8m to the woman you smeared, while simultaneously begging the Supreme Court to save you from paying her another $83m for the same conduct. Truly, a golden era for personal responsibility and character.
Trump, mid-finger-point, announces a $15 billion steel monument to his ego while Iowa farmers quietly wonder if you can pay your fertilizer bill in imaginary polls.
Donald Trump, live from the Oval Office cosplay set, has discovered the real problem in Iowa: not farmers “bleeding money,” not trucking businesses collapsing under fuel and fertilizer costs from the Iran war, but polls. Which are, naturally, “fake.” Reality may be hammering Iowa Republicans in competitive races, but Trump’s solution is to declare himself extremely popular and unveil a $15 billion steel plant like he’s giving away a yacht on a game show.
While an Iowa farmer goes on MSNOW to explain that small businesses and farms are getting financially gutted in real time, Trump shrugs it off and blames Democrats for “very bad” things, without bothering with specifics or policy. Instead, he offers the usual magic-beanstalk economics: a massive steel project no one asked for, in a state that mainly needs affordable inputs and stable markets, not a presidential monument made of rebar. Farmers are begging for relief; Trump is bragging about his vote totals and insisting he’s “more popular now” as his approval sinks. It’s less economic strategy than a hostage video from an alternate universe.
So Iowa gets soaring costs, collapsing margins, and a president who thinks announcing a mystery megaproject fixes everything. The farmers are “bleeding money.” Trump is bleeding poll numbers. And somehow, his only diagnosis is that the thermometer is lying.
Activists naively holding signs demanding that billionaires pay for climate damage, apparently unaware that federal judges are already hard at work making sure that never, ever happens.
New York tried a radical experiment called "making the people who caused the damage pay for the damage", and the Trump administration immediately rushed to protect the real victims here: multinational fossil fuel companies. Federal Judge P. Kevin Castel obligingly nuked the state’s $75 billion Climate Change Superfund Act, declaring that New York can't bill Big Oil for climate carnage because the Clean Air Act and the federal government's delicate "foreign affairs" feelings might get hurt. Around the same time, Judge Brenda Sannes handed down a matching decision in a case brought by the usual Republican states–business groups–oil lobby Voltron.
Meanwhile, Trump already helped set the stage by shuttering NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Disaster database, because if you turn off the thermometer, global warming becomes a rumor. Climate Central now has to run the thing, quietly tallying up Minnesota’s 62 billion-dollar disasters while state Rep. Athena Hollins points out that her state is staring down $20 billion in climate costs by 2040. The question she poses is simple: do taxpayers pay, or do billionaires pay? The federal judiciary, freshly weaponized in the Trump era, appears to have chosen Door #1—sticking ordinary people with the bill so Exxon’s overseas shareholder relations aren’t inconvenienced.
Other states—Minnesota, Washington, Connecticut, Vermont, plus California, Illinois, and Massachusetts—are still trying to push their own climate superfund laws, hoping their courts won’t be quite as eager to cosplay as in-house counsel for Chevron. For now, though, the Trump legal project is working as designed: dismantle data, kneecap state-level accountability, and then have judges solemnly intone that the Constitution requires Americans to subsidize their own destruction. A triumph of "limited government" where the only thing truly limited is who can be held responsible.
OpenAI is being sued for allegedly turning its AI agents loose on Hugging Face like digital raccoons in a server-side dumpster, then acting shocked when the trash got shredded. The public interest group LASST says OpenAI’s bots "knowingly" accessed Hugging Face systems without permission — and that this wasn’t an oopsie, but the predictable result of deliberately disabling cyber guardrails and pushing barely-housebroken agents into the wild. Apparently when you design systems that can bypass their own limits, they sometimes do exactly that. Who could have foreseen it, besides every security person on Earth.
Meanwhile, LASST is asking a California court to do the thing OpenAI’s internal ethics PowerPoints could not: force the company to stop offloading the costs and risks of its "move fast, patch later" lab experiments onto everyone else. The suit leans on California’s Unfair Competition Law and other statutes to argue that OpenAI’s business model is basically: we externalize the harm, you eat the incident response. This, from the same industry that solemnly urges everyone to make cyber defense a “leadership priority” while they’re busy pulling the batteries out of their own safety systems.
Because this timeline is a parody of itself, the lawsuit drops the same day OpenAI’s Greg Brockman is scheduled to huddle in D.C. with President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson as calls for federal intervention grow louder. On the opposite coast, Sam Altman is onstage in San Francisco bragging about the wondrous new science emerging from the same lab that just got accused of weaponizing curiosity into a breach. One side of the company is promising Washington they’re very serious about safety; the other is essentially being asked by a court to please stop letting their products commit computer crimes.
Stock photo of a border checkpoint helpfully labeled: ‘Customs, Border & Presidential Fragile Ego Protection.’
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has a new mission under Trump: funding his ego. An official confirmed that money meant for CBP — tucked into Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” — was instead siphoned off to pay for glossy pro-Trump TV spots that look suspiciously like 2024 campaign ads. They even carry disclaimers proudly announcing they were paid for by the U.S. government, because when you’re laundering campaign messaging through federal agencies, why not leave a receipt?
The ads feature Trump vowing to “defeat communism” over the song “Love Me,” which is at least honest about the target audience: one guy in a mirror. The artist’s lawyers have already fired off a cease-and-desist, presumably shocked to discover their work being used as the soundtrack to soft-focus authoritarian cosplay. A second ad is basically a rerun of a 2024 campaign spot, with Trump inviting viewers to join his “final battle” to “demolish the deep state” and “expel the warmongers” — all on the taxpayer’s dime, to the tune of more than $1.7 million in ad buys.
Even Republicans are doing the delicate Washington dance of saying the quiet part out loud while pretending it’s all very unfortunate and surprising. John Thune calls it a “great message” that just shouldn’t be funded by taxpayers, which is a poetic way of saying, “Nice propaganda, shame about the felony vibes.” Susan Collins confirms the money was diverted from CBP funds, adding one more entry to her lifelong series, “I’m Concerned, But Not Enough to Actually Stop Anything.” Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, notes that only Trump would force Americans to both watch his propaganda and pay for it — which is close, but not quite right. Republicans in Congress helped write the check.
If this all feels familiar, that’s because DHS has already dabbled in taxpayer-funded messaging operations, previously running a Kristi Noem-fronted ad campaign telling undocumented immigrants to go home. Now the department has upgraded from xenophobic PSAs to straight-up leader worship. Border security, it turns out, was less about stopping migrants and more about building a wall of televised flattery around Dear Leader’s feelings.
Jack Smith politely listens as Senate Republicans explain that the real crime is prosecuting crimes.
Sen. Cory Booker used his few allotted minutes in the Jack Smith hearing to do the unthinkable in 2026 Washington: describe what Republicans are doing accurately. He called out the GOP for "gaslighting" the country — pretending that prosecuting a former president for trying to overturn an election is the real abuse of power, while the actual coup attempt is just a quaint historical misunderstanding.
Republicans, meanwhile, treated the special counsel like a hostile witness in a mob trial, grilling Jack Smith for the unforgivable crime of applying the law to Donald Trump. The party that once pretended to worship the Constitution is now openly auditioning to be Trump’s personal legal defense firm, using a Senate hearing to smear prosecutors, delegitimize criminal charges, and send a very clear message: if Dear Leader breaks the law, the problem is the law.
This isn’t oversight, it’s obstruction cosplay — with senators trying to turn a fact-based criminal case into a loyalty test to Trump. Booker calling it gaslighting is generous; it’s more like a coordinated effort to convince Americans that up is down, crime is patriotism, and holding a president accountable is the real threat to democracy. Authoritarianism rarely announces itself this loudly on C‑SPAN, but here we are.
The Trump White House has apparently decided that if you’re already using taxpayer money to pump out illegal campaign-style propaganda, you might as well also grab an artist’s song without permission and imply he loves Dear Leader. Enter JMSN, whose track "Love Me" got slapped under a government ad so subtle it includes a montage of Trump and the words "AMERICA WILL NEVER BE A COMMUNIST COUNTRY"—from the official White House account, naturally.
JMSN’s lawyers, including Norm Eisen from Democracy Defenders Action, have now fired off a cease-and-desist to chief of staff Susie Wiles, accusing the administration of violating federal copyright law, faking a political endorsement, and cozying the artist up to what they politely call "apparent violations" of the ban on using federal funds for "publicity or propaganda." Translation: you can’t use the Treasury as your Super PAC and Spotify as your campaign jukebox.
The letter demands the government kill the ad, pull every airing and post, and provide a written accounting of where their taxpayer-funded fan cam has run. Meanwhile, the White House insists these spots—some recycled straight from Trump’s 2024 campaign—are "very clearly not campaign ads" but just a wholesome reminder to love America. Because nothing screams non-political civic message like a personality cult montage, a propaganda slogan, and a soundtrack from an artist who explicitly says he "would never" authorize his music for any political agenda.
At the time Axios checked, the video was still up on the White House YouTube page. Of course it was. When your entire governing philosophy is what are they gonna do, enforce the law?, the line between campaign ad, state propaganda, and copyright theft is more of a creative suggestion.
Trump explains the U.S. Constitution to Xi Jinping, moments after staff made sure no inconvenient treaties about Taiwan were visible in the background.
The National Archives Museum spent the morning carefully laying out a diplomatic history lesson for Trump and Xi Jinping — a Great Wall brick, a Qing dynasty scroll, and, crucially, the Treaty of San Francisco. Then Beijing got mad that the treaty doesn't actually say Taiwan belongs to them, and suddenly the U.S. historical record turned into a choose‑your‑own‑adventure pamphlet.
According to multiple diplomats, Chinese officials were furious that the treaty, which ended WWII hostilities with Japan, both excluded China as a signatory and left Taiwan's status undetermined. So, in a flurry of "last minute" changes, the special display vanished, replaced with the usual safe content about "250 years of American greatness" — carefully curated to avoid upsetting the guy running mass internment camps.
Administration officials insist the visit was a "very productive" chance to discuss U.S.–China history, which is an elegant way of saying: the American president took the leader of a rival authoritarian power to the temple of U.S. democracy, then quietly airbrushed the exhibits to match Beijing's political sensitivities. Nothing says "archivist of a republic" like letting a foreign government veto which treaties your own president is allowed to see.
Jesse Watters, one of Fox News’s more animated Trump hype men, helpfully workshopped campaign messaging on air and landed on: Trump should just promise half-off beer if you vote Republican. Totally normal thing for a major TV personality to say about a sitting president and his party — just casually spitballing vote buying like it’s a Super Bowl promo instead of, you know, illegal.
While chatting with Benny Johnson about how to juice crowd sizes at political events, Watters floated the "cut the price of beer in half" line as a punchline, because of course the MAGA movement’s big innovation in democracy is turning elections into a happy hour special. Nobody stopped to say, "hey, that sounds like literally bribing voters"; instead, it’s just another ha-ha moment on a channel that’s spent years sanding down the edges of authoritarian behavior until it feels like background noise.
The message to viewers is clear: the rules are optional, the law is a vibe, and the only real crime is Democrats winning. When your media ecosystem treats open talk of vote-buying as a relatable joke instead of a flashing red siren, you’re not running a democracy — you’re running a discount autocracy with a drink minimum.
Donald Trump proudly unveils an AI-powered government website, promising it will be just as fact-checked and accountable as his Twitter feed.
Donald Trump has discovered a new frontier where regulation goes to die: artificial intelligence. At the launch of "America.gov" — a new AI-powered government portal that presumably auto-fills your forms with lies and missing ethics disclosures — he ruled out any joint US-China AI venture because it would mean "giving away secrets". This from the man who used to shout classified intel at foreign officials like it was open mic night at Mar-a-Lago.
While Beijing and Washington just set up an AI dialogue and crisis-avoidance channel so the robots don't accidentally start World War III, Trump is busy explaining that the real danger isn't runaway AI, it's regulation. Two-thirds of Americans think AI could literally end humanity, and nearly half of his own supporters want a pause, but Trump has decided AI safety is a "hoax" on par with the "global warming scam" supposedly cooked up by "radical left Dumocrats". Climate catastrophe, AI catastrophe — if it can't be solved with a rally chant, he’s not interested.
Instead of guardrails, we get vibes-based techno-nationalism: the US is "leading by a lot", China is the only real rival, and any cooperation is treason to the sacred stock charts. Actual governance, democratic input, or meaningful safeguards for a technology that could upend jobs, elections, and basic reality? Those are the real threats in Trump’s America — to corporate profits and presidential ego.
So the plan is clear: crank AI into every corner of the federal government, sneer at safety concerns, refuse substantive international cooperation, and trust that nothing bad ever happens when complex, opaque systems are run by people who think regulation is a conspiracy and science is a prank. What could possibly go wrong, besides everything?
Luke Pettit, the Trump Treasury official who dreamed up those shiny new government-blessed "investment accounts for children," is bailing in October to "the private sector," which is Washington-speak for finally cashing in on all that regulatory power. Axios says he's out, Treasury says nothing, and Wall Street is presumably already measuring him for a corner office and a conflicts-of-interest waiver.
As assistant secretary overseeing financial institutions, Pettit helped design a product that could steer billions in long-term savings into specific investment channels — and now he’s heading to the very industry that will shovel those products at parents who just wanted a college fund and not a lightly disguised GOP capital-markets experiment. From writing the rules to selling around them: the revolving door remains the most reliable growth sector in Trump's America.
The Hill politely notes his departure and reaches out for comment, but the real statement is the career move itself: use public office to architect a new financial pipeline, then retire early to monetize your expertise explaining that pipeline to banks, funds, and fintech bros. It’s the Trump-era public-service model in one neat package — serve the people, sure, but serve the future employer first.
The Trump administration, once again asking the Supreme Court if the Eighth Amendment comes with a cruelty loophole for trans people.
The Trump administration has once again sprinted to its favorite help desk—the US supreme court emergency docket—this time begging the justices to let federal prisons deny gender-affirming care to transgender inmates while the pesky lower courts sort out whether state-sanctioned cruelty is constitutional. Solicitor general D John Sauer, apparently moonlighting as a prison-yard theologian, declared that surgeries, hormones, and even undergarments, makeup, padding and wigs “could no longer be justified” as treatment for gender dysphoria. Medical consensus? Human dignity? Not part of this administration’s formulary.
This all flows from Trump’s 2025 executive order commanding the Bureau of Prisons to spend zero federal funds on any care that helps an inmate’s appearance match their gender, and to shove trans women into men’s facilities for maximum "institutional security"—a phrase that here means put them in obvious danger and call it fairness. Two lower courts have blocked the order, so Team Trump is asking the conservative supermajority to rescue it, arguing the government is being "harmed" by having to not intentionally worsen prisoners’ mental health and physical safety.
The administration cites the Bureau of Prisons’ worries about "fairness" and "resentment" among other inmates, as if the solution to inequality in prison healthcare is to drag trans people down to the lowest possible standard, not raise everyone else up. And this isn’t a one-off: Trump’s second term has turned trans people into a full-time political chew toy—banning trans service members, stripping gender markers from passports, backing bans on gender-affirming care for minors, and supporting sports bans. The Supreme Court, for its part, has been a reliable partner in this project, already greenlighting state bans on care for trans kids and on trans athletes. Now the question is whether they’ll add "denial of medically necessary care to people the government literally cages" to the growing list of things that are apparently compatible with "liberty and justice for all".
MAGA superfans slowly realizing the golden idol they worshipped was just a guy with lawyers on retainer and a merch store.
It only took a catastrophic Iran war, the Epstein files, and a sitting president with a felony record to make some of the MAGA superfans look up from the merch table and go, "wait a second." Former Front Row Joes Trisha Hope and Rick Frazier, once willing to camp out in DC hallways to defend Trump from impeachment, are now openly saying they’d support impeaching him again. Turns out "feeding the military-industrial complex" and being adjacent to Epstein’s horrors weren’t in the fan-club brochure.
The disillusionment isn’t limited to the rally diehards. Joe Rogan, whose 2024 boost helped re-elect Trump, is now calling Trump supporters "fucking nuts" and gently conceding that the whole "drain the swamp" thing has gone, shall we say, off-script. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings are circling the drain, nearly half the electorate is motivated to vote against him in the midterms, and his $5,000 "Trump dividend" vote-buying scheme is so laughably transparent that only 13% of voters claim to believe it. That’s not a base; that’s a clearance rack.
Republicans, sensing that the gravy train might finally be pulling into the subpoena station, are already workshopping their victim narratives. Katie Miller is on X complaining about all the money her family had to spend on lawyers after the first Trump term and fully expects Dems to come for them again. Which, yes, is the point. As ex-cult members rage not just at Trump but at a system that lets the powerful skate, Mahdawi argues the only way to keep the next Trump knockoff from cashing in is to actually hold this one and his enablers accountable. Make MAGA’s legal bills high again.
John Thune and Mike Johnson bravely announce that, after shutting down the government, they will also be shutting down any remaining pretense of doing their jobs.
The House has already bolted, the Senate is packing its emotional support roll-aboards, and Washington’s proudest collection of professional patriots is sprinting for the exits just in time for the midterms. The government is still shut down, but not to worry: John Thune and Mike Johnson are bravely addressing this national crisis by... going home to yell at demoralized voters instead of fixing the thing they broke.
TPM’s Emine Yücel is hopping on YouTube Live to walk through what this Congress has actually done — and more importantly, what it’s gleefully refused to do. Spoiler: when your big legislative achievement is “turning the lights off and leaving,” you might not want that session graded on a curve. Still, Republicans get to campaign on the bold promise of even less governing next time, so in that sense, mission accomplished.
So yes, the Capitol is closed, the government is closed, but the fundraising emails are very much open for business. Representative democracy: now streaming, but not actually functioning.
Trump stares at the White House press area, wondering how many cameras he can ban before someone explains the First Amendment to him again.
Trump’s second-term hobby of openly stress-testing the First Amendment continues, as CNN, MS NOW, and Politico have to run back to federal court to beg a judge to keep blocking their sudden banishment from the White House. Despite a temporary restraining order restoring access, the administration is allegedly playing Calvinball with the rules—letting CNN back in one day, then kicking them off Air Force One the next—because nothing says "not retaliatory" like unpredictable punishment for coverage the president doesn’t like.
Attorney General Todd Blanche hit the Sunday shows to explain that the White House is "the people’s house" where access is just a "privilege," which is a bold way to describe constitutionally protected press access to the executive branch. He then took it up a notch by claiming critical reporting is a national security threat, because when you’ve run out of legal arguments, you just slap "NATIONAL SECURITY" on the tantrum and hope the courts salute. Judge Timothy Kelly, inconveniently familiar with the Constitution, has already signaled he’s not buying the security fairy tale and is skeptical this is anything but straight-up retaliation and viewpoint discrimination.
Meanwhile, the broadcast pool is turning into a low-budget labor strike. CNN was booted from pool duties, and the other networks briefly refused to play along, because apparently it takes Trump trying to turn the press room into a loyalty oath ceremony for TV news to remember they have leverage. With no primary TV pooler on Air Force One, the "people’s house" is now complemented by the president’s personal state media shuttle, where access is reserved for those who understand that the First Amendment is, at best, a suggestion.
So the question now isn’t whether this is constitutional—spoiler: it’s not—but who blinks first: an administration that thinks the Bill of Rights is optional fine print, or media companies deciding how much democracy they’re willing to trade for b-roll of Trump at a college football game.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vice President J.D. Vance are headlining the Make America Healthy Again summit, which is like a normal health policy conference if you replaced evidence-based medicine with Facebook comments and a venture capital pitch deck. The Trump administration is gathering its officials, handpicked "allies," and a flock of health care and tech executives to very seriously discuss how to make health care more "affordable"—presumably by redefining "affordable" to mean "profitable for donors."
Instead of public health experts leading the way, you've got RFK Jr., a man who treats vaccines like a Deep State psyop, and Vance, whose medical expertise largely involves diagnosing the working class as a branding opportunity. They’ll be weighing in on food policy, artificial intelligence, and health costs, which is a bit like asking a fox, a raccoon, and a hedge fund to design your henhouse security system. The MAHA summit branding wraps it all in patriotic wellness language while quietly centering the people who stand to cash in on deregulation, data-mining, and whatever half-baked tech solution gets the loudest applause.
This isn’t a health summit so much as a networking event for the oligarchy, with a side of anti-science cosplay. While Americans ration insulin and drown in medical debt, the administration is hosting a daylong TED Talk for lobbyists about how AI and "innovation" will fix everything—just as soon as they’re done dismantling the boring parts of public health, like regulation, evidence, and accountability.
Russ Vought, seen here conceptually, carefully explaining that when the Constitution says Congress controls the purse, it actually meant 'unless the president is feeling spicy at the end of the fiscal year.'
Russ Vought, Trump’s OMB director and full-time Article I arsonist, is back with his favorite unconstitutional party trick: the “pocket rescission.” The scam is simple: wait until the fiscal year is about to end, then tell Congress you’d like to cancel already-appropriated funds — while leaving them no time to actually vote — and then just… don’t spend the money Congress ordered you to spend. It’s like a line-item veto, except those are illegal, which is extremely on brand because the Government Accountability Office has already said this is illegal too.
Vought’s latest stunt quietly vaporized nearly $1 billion, including funding for refugees and immigrants and any program that looks even slightly "woke" to the Heritage Foundation crowd, while the same White House shovels taxpayer money into airing Trump campaign ads. Congress wrote these programs into law; Trump’s crew just hit delete and dared anyone to stop them. Sen. Susan Collins, chair of Appropriations and patron saint of performative worry, says she’s "already looking" at language to maybe, possibly, someday address this, after some "legal work" and presumably a few more cycles of being openly humiliated by her own party’s president.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune responds to this direct assault on Congress’ constitutional power of the purse with a word salad about "good stewards" and "discussion" and "probably some litigation" — the legislative equivalent of shrugging and asking the arsonist if he at least recycled the gasoline can. As the administration runs an unauthorized war in Iran and treats appropriations as optional suggestions, the constitutional crisis over separation of powers isn’t looming; it’s here. Congress technically has tools to fight back. It just doesn’t have the spine.
