Friday, September 25, 2026
Brett Kavanaugh, briefly playing hall monitor for a Missouri GOP that tried to gerrymander so hard it annoyed *this* Supreme Court.
Missouri Republicans, at the gentle "urging" of President Donald Trump in 2025, tried to carve Kansas City up like a corporate merger to turn a 6–2 congressional map into a 7–1 GOP dream board. Voters, rudely insisting on being people, gathered 300,000 signatures to force a referendum, which should have sidelined the new map for 2026. Missouri’s Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins responded by waiting until primary day to declare the referendum invalid and running the primaries on the gerrymandered map anyway, because nothing says "election integrity" like changing the rules mid‑game.
The Missouri Supreme Court then said: actually, no, the referendum is valid, use the old 6–2 map. Hoskins sprinted to SCOTUS, where Brett Kavanaugh—yes, that Brett Kavanaugh—found the argument so flimsy he swatted it away solo. Undeterred, two GOP candidates and two voters found a friendly federal judge, Stephen Clark, who ordered the state to keep the 7–1 map for the general. A Republican appeals court backed him, creating the fun spectacle where the Missouri Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court said one thing, and lower federal courts said, "Have you considered ignoring them?"
Eventually even this Supreme Court, which just greenlit Trump’s DHS using a Homeland Security citizenship database to stalk voter rolls, got tired of Missouri’s clown car. In a unanimous, five‑page opinion, they not only blocked the MAGA map and restored the 2022 lines, they basically wrote "stop screwing around" in lawyerese to the lower courts, warning them not to pull any more stunts that would force Missouri to use the 2025 map. When a Court that’s been lovingly slow‑walking American democracy into the woodchipper tells you to chill on the election sabotage, you’ve really overachieved.
When your ‘public service announcement’ looks like the director’s cut of a Dear Leader tribute video, but the taxpayers still get the bill.
The Trump White House has decided that "public service announcement" means you pay, he campaigns. They spent taxpayer money to buy Fox News airtime for a White House–produced spot that is basically a 30-second love letter to Trump’s "second term" and his fight against the imaginary horde of "Dumocrat communists"—all neatly labeled on-screen as "Paid for by the US government" like a corruption disclaimer.
According to the press office, this is just a normal, wholesome PSA encouraging Americans to "love their country"—which apparently can only be represented by Trump in every single frame, plus a Dana White testimonial recycled straight from the 2024 campaign. Previous administrations used PSAs to, you know, inform the public, not to run a taxpayer-funded highlight reel of themselves overseeing a raid on Venezuela, fawning over MBS, accepting a made-up Fifa peace prize, and announcing a class of Navy ships named after themselves like a bargain-bin Kim Jong-un.
The Fox version of the ad adds the subtle touches: text bragging about "largest tax cuts in history," "reigniting American manufacturing," and "defend law and order and police," all over Trump’s voice promising to "defeat communism, socialism and Marxism in America" while a chorus sings "love me" in the background. Meanwhile, the White House insists this is not a campaign ad because Trump isn’t technically on the ballot—he’s just told his supporters to "pretend I’m on the ballot" in the upcoming midterms. So it’s not electioneering, it’s just a government-funded personality cult commercial. Totally fine, nothing authoritarian at all.
Pictured: a family proudly modeling the latest in authoritarian athleisure, moments before discovering that international diplomacy and Facebook ‘Lol lol’ do not mix.
Trump, having apparently run out of functioning institutions to vandalize, has now moved on to geography. By executive order, he demanded that federal agencies start calling Lake Ontario "Lake America" as part of his trade war with Canada, because nothing asserts serious statesmanship like rage-editing a map. Canada, led by Mark Carney, politely responded that the name Ontario predates both countries and that they will continue living in reality instead of on Truth Social.
Meanwhile in Michigan, Jane Smith, CEO of Family First Credit Union, decided to turn this diplomatic tantrum into a family fashion statement. She reportedly used ChatGPT to AI-edit a photo of her family in matching "Lake America" sweatshirts, then posted it on Facebook on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 with the caption "Like our sweatshirts? Not sure Canada will" followed by "Lol lol"—a bold choice when you’re literally flying to Halifax, the city that sheltered thousands of stranded Americans on 9/11.
The post went viral, Canadians were not amused, and the credit union suddenly discovered what "reputational risk" means. After a round of "we didn’t mean it politically" interviews and retroactive empathy, Family First announced that Smith is "no longer employed" and apologized for the "pain" caused. The lake, for its part, remains called Lake Ontario by Canada, international law, and basic cartography. Trump’s order can’t change that, but it’s doing a stellar job of turning random Americans into collateral damage in his ongoing campaign to replace governance with branding exercises.
The D.C. Circuit just handed the Trump administration a shiny new toy: the power to officially brand Anthropic, a major AI company, as a "supply chain risk" and shove it onto the Pentagon’s blacklist. No messy legislation, no real transparency, just the magic words "national security" and a rubber stamp from the courts. Somewhere in the E.O. suite, a lawyer just realized they can do this to anyone who annoys them.
Far from some careful, technocratic safeguard, this is the Trump Pentagon getting judicial cover to decide which companies live in the federal market and which get tossed into the memory hole. Today it’s Anthropic; tomorrow it’s whatever firm wouldn’t donate to the right super PAC or dared to criticize Dear Leader on cable news. Wrap it in enough classified appendices and suddenly corporate blacklisting becomes a patriotic duty. Authoritarianism, but make it procurement policy.
Ty Cobb, former Trump White House lawyer, patiently explaining that the courts are about to be used like a bouncy castle for one man’s fragile ego.
Former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb went on TV to gently inform America that the courts are about to be treated like Trump’s personal emotional support animal as he grows "desperate to cling to power." Translation: buckle up for another round of frivolous lawsuits, bad-faith constitutional theories, and emergency filings that read like Truth Social posts with Bluebook citations.
Instead of a normal transfer or test of power, Cobb is predicting a stress test of the entire judicial system as Trump tries to lawyer his way out of political gravity. The plan appears to be: lose in the court of public opinion, then try to win in the court of "what if the Constitution actually means the opposite of what it says?" It's less a legal strategy and more a slow-motion coup wrapped in motions to dismiss.
So the judiciary, already exhausted from years of Trump-world nonsense, now gets to serve as the last sandbag between American democracy and a guy who thinks "presidential immunity" means lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card plus unlimited do-overs. The Founders envisioned checks and balances; Trump heard "multiple venues to throw tantrums."
The Trump administration has managed the impressive legal feat of being held in contempt of court twice by a Trump-appointed federal judge, because even Stephanie Gallagher has apparently hit her limit on "oops, we deported him again" as a governing philosophy. DHS deported a 19-year-old asylum seeker, identified as E.L.A., to El Salvador despite not one, not two, but three standing court orders saying "do not deport this person."
Rather than admit they ran an illegal rendition service out of sheer cruelty and incompetence, the government told the court they'd learned about the deportation from an email — like a war crime reply-all — and are "considering appropriate steps" to fix the "communication errors" that led to this second wrongful removal. Gallagher's order is basically a judicial babysitting note: bring him back to the U.S., give him his documents, stop trying to deport him until you finish the asylum process, and report back by Oct. 2 on whether he even feels safe enough to return.
This all stems from a class-action case that started in 2019, when Trump's first-term geniuses at USCIS tried to kneecap young asylum seekers' ability to even pursue their claims. Years later, the same case is still exposing that the administration treats court orders like unsubscribe links — decorative, easily ignored, and definitely not binding. Law and order, it turns out, applies only to teenagers fleeing violence, never to the people illegally putting them on planes.
James Comey’s dangerous contraband: seashells arranged into a coded anti-Trump message, proving once and for all that the real threat to the republic is beach typography.
The Trump Justice Department’s most fragile feelings case — The United States v. James Comey’s Instagram Seashells — has been kicked down the beach until early 2027. U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan hit pause while she wades through a tidal pool of motions, including Comey’s argument that this whole thing exists because Donald Trump can’t handle a passive-aggressive craft project. Prosecutors insist that Comey’s photo of seashells spelling out “8647” was a dire threat to the president, since “86” is restaurant slang for canceling an item and 47 is what Trump thinks he’s entitled to be called on monogrammed bathrobes.
The former FBI director hasn’t even entered a plea yet because the arraignment just got punted to January, giving his very large legal team time to explain to the court that this prosecution is less “good-faith application of the law” and more “yearslong presidential vendetta dressed up as an indictment.” Legal experts across the spectrum are already shellshocked (NBC’s word, but honestly, fair) at the idea that a sitting president can order up a felony case over an Instagram post and call it justice. Meanwhile, the key witness is an estranged associate who openly said they hope Comey goes to jail, and the rookie lead prosecutor bailed on the case months ago, presumably after realizing his career was being launched on the legal equivalent of a QAnon message board.
So we have: a president using the criminal process to punish a critic for protected speech, a DOJ bending itself into origami to pretend a beach photo is a true threat, and a federal court now stuck cleaning up the mess. If you were writing a handbook on how to normalize authoritarian abuse of prosecutorial power one petty grievance at a time, you’d just screenshot this docket and call it a day.
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s Triumphal Arch, featuring all the subtlety of a Call of Duty loading screen welded to a megachurch logo.
Apparently the Trump administration looked at a deadly 2025 midair crash near Reagan National Airport and concluded what the area really needs is a 250-foot "Triumphal Arch" stuffed with military hardware, rooftop snipers, and drones buzzing around the approach path. Senator Tammy Duckworth politely suggested this is a catastrophically stupid idea for air safety; the FAA, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump’s ego, calmly replied that a giant armed monument under a busy flight path is totally fine.
While actual safety experts and local historic preservation officers are over here screaming into the void, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation — conveniently led by Trump appointees — just cut off required consultations about how this thing will affect 42 historic properties around Arlington National Cemetery. The National Park Service floated a mitigation plan; locals said "this is bad and also nonsense"; Trump’s council responded by slamming the door and promising a report later, presumably after the concrete has cured and the gold leaf has been ordered.
Congressman Don Beyer showed up at the site and found heavy equipment already digging away, even though the administration is supposed to give 48 hours notice before work starts. Workers claimed they were just doing "archaeological" soil evaluation, which is a very cute way to describe "we’re building the Dear Leader’s murder balcony." The rendering features a golden, winged Lady Liberty atop the arch, flanked by gold eagles and draped in "One Nation Under God" and "Liberty and Justice for All" — because nothing says liberty and justice like a weaponized, theocrat-branded monument looming over a cemetery and a flight path.
The Supreme Court has graciously decided that, yes, the Trump administration may temporarily run its freshly repackaged voter purge contraption, a.k.a. the revamped SAVE database, just in time for the midterms. The same system a federal judge said "haphazardly combined and repurposed" Americans' data using "unreliable" citizenship records is now cleared for takeoff, pointed squarely at the voter rolls. Because nothing says "free and fair elections" like bulk-searching government databases to see who you can quietly boot from democracy.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, politely pointed out that maybe, just maybe, using a legally dubious mass-screening tool right before an election and risking disenfranchisement is worse than the "nonexistent" harm the government suffers by not being allowed to cosplay as a data-mining ICE field office for local election boards. Meanwhile, DHS General Counsel James Percival ran to X to declare victory because the administration had to go to the Supreme Court "just so we could use government data"—a charming way to describe building an unreliable, bulk-query purge engine out of a benefits eligibility system.
Voting rights groups, including the League of Women Voters, are pointing out that this ruling effectively invites mass, error-ridden targeting of eligible voters weeks before an election, via a system a lower court already ruled violated multiple laws. The Court’s conservative majority, however, has decided the federal government must be allowed to use "the program it believes is best suited to the task"—even if that task is quietly sanding down the electorate. Combine this with Trump’s broader crusade to "reshape" elections, and you get the 2026 model of American democracy: now with more database-driven disenfranchisement and fewer guardrails.
Trump apparently took a break from threatening everyone on Earth to politely ask Xi Jinping to stop helping Iran not get blown up, according to U.S. Ambassador to Beijing David Perdue. The U.S. is running a "massive economic pressure campaign"—which is a very sanitized way of saying "slow-motion siege"—while China allegedly supplies Iran with air defenses, drone parts, and high-res satellite imagery so it can, minor detail, target U.S. bases and Navy ships. The Pentagon responded by changing operational procedures, which is Pentagon-speak for "we just realized the other side can see us."
Diplomacy, of course, is being handled by the natural choices for wartime nuclear negotiations: hotel developer Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, America’s least-qualified crown prince. From the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, they’re passing notes via Qatar to Iran’s foreign minister like it’s middle school Model UN, except this time there’s an actual naval blockade and a real Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s offer? Reopen the strait and restart nuclear talks if the U.S. lifts sanctions, ends the blockade, and agrees to a ceasefire. The U.S. response? Iran "doesn't control" the strait, so it can’t make demands about the waterway it literally borders and can close with a couple of missiles.
While Xi is telling Trump to de-escalate and go back to the June memorandum and a nuclear deal, the administration is insisting Iran is a totally separate issue from Taiwan, as if anyone believes this White House can mentally separate anything from anything else. Qatar is now waiting to hear Trump’s response to Iran’s proposal, which is a polite diplomatic way of saying, "we're all sitting around hoping the guy who tweets war threats like Yelp reviews doesn’t tank the last remaining path back to sanity."
House Republicans, after two years of using their majority as a live-action Twitter reply guy feed for Trump, are now shocked to learn that voters in Trump +7 districts don't actually enjoy higher prices, permanent crisis, and a government run like a failing crypto exchange. Cook Political Report just shifted 15 races toward Democrats and now projects a Dem pickup of 5–15 seats, which would hand the gavel back to people who at least pretend to read legislation before screaming about it on cable news.
Republicans keep insisting their massive cash advantage and "stronger ground game" will save them, which is a bold claim when your ground game is mostly subpoenas, stunt impeachments, and fundraising emails written in all caps. The median Toss Up district voted for Trump by 7 points in 2024, but Trump is now underwater there thanks to his stellar record of breaking the economy, then yelling at the thermometer for showing a fever. Democrats, for their part, say "the floor is falling out" from under House Republicans, which is generous; the GOP didn’t just fall through the floor, they spent two years sawing the joists while livestreaming it on Truth Social.
So now we have 208 seats leaning blue, 205 leaning red, and a pile of Trump-district Toss Ups where voters have to decide if they want more culture-war cosplay and performative hearings, or maybe a Congress that occasionally passes something other than performative sanctions on drag queens. The NRCC insists "nobody outside the D.C. bubble" cares about ratings changes, which is true: people outside the bubble mostly care about rent, groceries, and not having to watch their representative audition for Newsmax between government shutdown threats. Turns out, when you run on chaos, eventually the chaos runs you.
Peggy Carr, former NCES chief, moments before Trump’s efficiency wizards decided data was too dangerous for America’s children.
US math and reading scores just hit a 25-year low, so naturally the Trump administration responded with a bold new education strategy: destroy the agency that measures how bad it is. The National Center for Education Statistics went from around 100 staff to twelve, after Trump’s beloved "Department of Government Efficiency" (Doge) ripped up nearly $900m in contracts like a toddler discovering scissors. The federal office that runs The Nation’s Report Card and tracks everything from school violence to how students pay for college has been reduced to a statistical ghost town.
The Education Department’s spokesperson insists this is all about "reform" and "high-quality statistics" – which is an interesting way to describe canceling major longitudinal studies midstream, including a $47m early childhood survey tracking post-Covid kids through elementary school. Researchers were about to find out how the pandemic actually affected children’s development, so of course Doge stepped in to make sure we never know. You can’t have data contradicting the vibes-based policy coming out of Mar-a-Lago.
Former NCES staff are pointing out that shooting the messenger doesn’t fix the message, but that’s kind of the point: if you don’t collect the numbers, you can’t be blamed for the results. Test scores are tanking, inequality is widening, and the official federal response is to blindfold the country and call it innovation. Trump broke the thermometer, declared the fever fake news, and then bragged about curing America’s schools.
JD Vance announces that hundreds of thousands of sick Americans are actually imaginary, while standing in front of a sign bragging about '$22 billion Obamacare fraud' like he just solved healthcare instead of setting it on fire.
The Trump administration has bravely identified a new national security threat: poor people with health insurance. Mehmet Oz, now somehow running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services instead of hawking green coffee bean extract, announced that 760,000 ACA marketplace enrollees are being purged as "phantoms" and "ghosts" based on an AI-powered witch finder that flags you if you used a broker, got full premium subsidies, and didn’t hand over the exact paperwork the bureaucracy suddenly decided it wanted. They won’t say how many are actual frauds, how many were enrolled without their knowledge, or how many are just low-income Americans who missed a 30-day notice in the mail. But don’t worry, Oz assures us these are "not real people." That’s one way to keep the mortality stats down.
JD Vance, currently cosplaying as a corruption-fighting populist, insists this is all about making sure only the right people get Obamacare subsidies, while experts point out the obvious: the administration is quietly dismantling ACA, Medicaid, and Medicare coverage piece by piece. Nearly 3 million people have already lost marketplace coverage in the last year, and now another 760,000 are being algorithmically ghosted, plus $2.2bn in Medicaid payments are being withheld from California and Minnesota’s home health aide programs that disabled people literally depend on to stay alive. The method here is simple: make enrollment so convoluted, hostile, and opaque that millions fall off coverage, then call it “fraud prevention” and brag about the savings.
Instead of verifying eligibility like a functioning government, CMS dumped a million-name "suspicious" list on insurers and gave people 30 days to respond or lose coverage — a perfectly designed filter to catch not just scammers, but anyone who is poor, sick, busy, disabled, non-English-speaking, or just unfamiliar with the concept that their own government is trying to kill their insurance behind their back. Health policy experts are already warning this mass disenrollment could destabilize the broader system. The Trump team, on the other hand, has discovered a far more important policy innovation: if you redefine vulnerable patients as "ghosts," you can cancel their coverage, call it a $2.2bn victory against fraud, and pretend the human cost doesn’t exist at all.
Fish swim beneath an oil rig, blissfully unaware they’ve been reclassified as participants in America’s booming outdoor recreation economy.
Trump signed an executive order with the very normal, not-at-all-industry-written title "Restoring American Saltwater Angling and Recreation," which translates to: let’s downgrade science so weekend boat guys and oil companies are happy. Federal agencies are told to "prioritize recreational fishing" and revisit the bedrock Magnuson-Stevens Act guidelines so they can creatively reinterpret pesky concepts like "overfishing," "rebuilding stocks," and "best available science" into something closer to "vibes-based biology".
Because no deregulation party is complete without fossil fuels, Interior is ordered to help turn decommissioned offshore oil and gas rigs into "artificial reefs" – or as the Center for Biological Diversity accurately calls it, a handout to the oil industry. Instead of making polluters clean up their rusting junk, the administration wants to rebrand it as habitat, never mind the invasive species, chemical leaching, navigational hazards, or the minor detail that "attracting fish" mostly just means concentrating them so they’re easier to catch.
If that weren’t enough ecosystem sabotage, the order also creates an "Interagency Shark and Pinniped Depredation Task Force" to deal with the horror of sharks and marine mammals doing what they’ve done for millions of years: eating fish. The task force is explicitly told to look at "barriers" to shark fisheries and international protections like CITES, i.e., how can we kill more sharks and loosen shark trade rules because anglers are mad their line got chomped. Conservation lawyers point out that most shark populations are still a fraction of historic levels, but the Trump administration’s solution to a stressed food web is to shoot the top predators and hope math stops working in the ocean.
So the US, once a global leader in marine conservation, is being lovingly steered toward "bystander" status while Trump officials congratulate themselves for "stability" in a $1.2tn recreation economy. Stable for whom? Oil companies dodging cleanup bills, shark traders eyeing new markets, and a political operation that treats the ocean as a theme park stocked by deregulation and managed by people who think science is just liberal witchcraft.
An AI-powered targeting interface, thoughtfully designed so that no human has to feel personally responsible for the war crime they just clicked 'confirm' on.
AI doomers are busy warning about hypothetical robot overlords while the actual AI is already doing what US foreign policy does best: helping bomb brown children and track immigrants. Israel used AI systems to auto-generate thousands of targets in Gaza with barely any human oversight, and the US joined the fun with an AI-assisted airstrike in Iran that hit an elementary school and killed 156 civilians. Congratulations to the "responsible innovation" crowd on their latest beta test.
Back home, the surveillance state is having the time of its life. DHS is using AI tools, including Microsoft Azure, to monitor, arrest, and deport immigrants at scale, while cops deploy facial recognition that keeps misidentifying Black and Latino people and feeding them into the carceral system. The NYPD’s Microsoft-built Domain Awareness System slurps in data from 18,000 cameras and exports the model to Georgia, Brazil, Singapore, and whoever else wants a turnkey techno-police state. Meanwhile, AI datacenters get parked in poor, rural communities, trading clean air for the privilege of powering your boss’s productivity tools.
You might think this would be a good moment for some democratic oversight. Instead, Donald Trump calls AI risks a "hoax" and insists any effort to limit it is a "sick conspiracy", while House Republicans blame Chinese disinformation for Americans not wanting a cancer factory humming next to their kids’ school. Israel’s culture minister Miki Zohar threatens to strip citizenship from documentary filmmakers who expose AI-assisted mass killing, because nothing says "we’re using this tech responsibly" like punishing the people who document what it actually does. But don’t worry, the same billionaires who spent years racing to build this stuff now assure us they’re very concerned.
Democratic leaders stare at a detailed blueprint for winning elections, then gently file it in the trash next to "codify Roe" and "don’t let fascists run the country."
Justice Democrats, the group that helped send Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib to Congress, somehow survived a $100 million AIPAC carpet-bombing and is now handing the Democratic Party a step-by-step guide on how to not lose the country to Trump’s authoritarian fan club again. After getting mauled by pro-Israel lobby money last cycle, they regrouped, endorsed 15 candidates, and watched seven of them win primaries — three of them knocking off incumbents who thought "being a Democrat" was the same thing as "having a pulse."
Instead of the usual "strongly worded letter" cosplay that passes for resistance in Chuck Schumer’s world, Justice Democrats is openly talking about taking on corporate power, AIPAC, crypto, and AI — basically the entire donor Rolodex of both parties. Usamah Andrabi politely explains that if Democrats don’t learn from the left about what to actually fight for, they’ll keep sleepwalking the country back into a "fascist and authoritarian regime" funded by the same corporate interests underwriting the DNC. A refreshing message for a party whose long-term strategy is typically: have you tried vibes?
While they’re trying to build a real base, the broader backdrop is Trump raging against CNN, Politico, and MS Now, attempting to strip press credentials until a federal judge told him no, and Trump ally David Ellison moving to swallow Paramount and Warner Bros., possibly with Elon Musk’s money. So on one side you’ve got democratic socialists scraping together small-dollar donations to keep democracy on life support; on the other, a sulking president and a couple of bored billionaires assembling a media Death Star. But sure, tell us again how the real problem is that the left is "too mean on Twitter."
Campaign debates used to be the part of democracy where candidates had to say things to each other’s faces instead of just laundering attacks through super PACs and rage‑bait ads. Now, across some of the most competitive gubernatorial and Senate races, both parties are deciding that facing voters and opponents in real time is an optional feature of self‑government. Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Texas — a growing list of high‑stakes races where the only "debate" is between dueling 30‑second hit jobs funded by dark money.
Florida’s David Jolly says he won’t debate Byron Donalds because you “can’t debate a liar,” while Ohio’s Amy Acton won’t share a stage with Vivek Ramaswamy because she thinks he’s dangerous. Greg Abbott just isn’t bothering to explain why he won’t debate Gina Hinojosa at all, and Joe Lombardo is ghosting Aaron Ford’s invitations like a bad Tinder match. Meanwhile, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs has upgraded her excuse software from "Kari Lake will turn this into a circus" to the new 2026 patch: debates are now just "short soundbites and political theater" — unlike, say, her own campaign’s short soundbites and political theater.
Even the Senate — allegedly the Temple of Debate™ — is quietly boarding up the windows. James Talarico is begging Ken Paxton to argue with him on Fox News, a.k.a. Paxton’s "safe space," while Roy Cooper and Michael Whatley play a rousing game of "after you" with debate invitations in North Carolina. Consultants openly admit what this really is: why risk an unscripted hour of accountability when you can spend millions micro‑targeting voters who won’t sit through more than a 15‑second clip? The American experiment has now reached the phase where democracy is considered too risky for politicians.
Gianni Infantino pretending the disciplinary committee acted independently while Trump is still on speakerphone.
USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino is now gently admitting what everyone with a functioning brain stem noticed at the time: having the President of the United States personally call FIFA president Gianni Infantino to get Folarin Balogun’s red card overturned might not have been the shining moment of sporting integrity the Trump White House thought it was. Trump bragged that he picked up the phone to lobby FIFA, FIFA swears their disciplinary committee just coincidentally came to the exact same conclusion after the call, and the rest of the world added this to the ever-growing file labeled: "Ah, so the rules only count when they help you."
Pochettino now says he wishes he’d been "more involved" in the decision, which is a polite way of saying, "maybe we shouldn't have turned a disciplinary ruling into a presidential favor from the world’s loudest man-child." The whole circus dumped a giant cloud of bad energy over the U.S. team, gave Belgium extra motivation, and ended with a 4–1 humiliation where tactics didn’t matter because the emotional and political fallout had already torched the locker room. Balogun himself later said he felt uncomfortable with the spotlight, which is what happens when your suspension becomes a joint production of U.S. Soccer, FIFA, and the Oval Office Casting Couch.
Pochettino’s big takeaway? Decisions like this should be handled by a "much more limited structure" and be "strictly sporting and common sense" — so, for example, not decided by a president chasing a Fox News highlight reel and a FIFA president allergic to the concept of independent governance. American democracy, FIFA governance, and now international soccer discipline: all quietly agreeing that under Trump, the rules are just suggestions until a powerful guy picks up the phone.
Trump beams down from a giant screen under an exit sign, which is the most honest campaign advice Republicans have gotten all year.
Republicans are experiencing a rare, possibly endangered phenomenon: dissent. With Trump demanding voters pretend he’s on the ballot — while sporting historically awful approval ratings — GOP candidates are suddenly discovering that tying themselves to an unpopular authoritarian who started a disastrous war with Iran and jacked up prices might not be the electoral cheat code they were promised. A plurality of voters now say their midterm vote is basically a referendum on how much they’d like Trump to go away, which is not exactly the branding the RNC was going for.
The loyalty cult is also springing leaks in the Senate, where Utah Republican Sen. John Curtis — not even up for reelection until 2030 — is calling for a Judiciary Committee investigation into Donald Trump Jr. after ProPublica reported that a Russian oligarch bankrolled large chunks of Don Jr.’s lavish wedding party. When senators from Utah are publicly side-eyeing your oligarch-financed family festivities, it’s a hint that your once-terrifying grip on the party might be slipping. GOP strategists are whispering that Trump "doesn't have the juice" he used to, which is a polite way of saying the strongman act looks a lot less impressive when the economy’s wrecked, the war is a mess, and your son’s reception reads like a sanctions violation with a cake.
