The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump brain trust has discovered a bold new way to win elections without that pesky "convincing voters" step: just rewrite the census so millions of people stop existing on paper. Hyper-partisan appointees at the Census Bureau are pushing a scheme to exclude most noncitizens from the population count used for House seats and the Electoral College, while also trying to stop collecting race and ethnicity data. Because if you can’t suppress the vote, the next best thing is to suppress reality.

To round out the authoritarian starter pack, Commerce is also killing off established privacy methods based on right-wing misinformation and floating a "bad idea" residency change that just happens to tilt power toward Republican states. The plan is so nakedly unconstitutional that experts are basically live-streaming the 14th Amendment at them, but the administration is racing the clock to jam rules through before courts and a potentially Democratic Congress can stop the takeover.

Democrats, if they manage to win Congress, get to play the exciting role of "emergency brake on creeping minority rule." Their options: pass new laws Trump will veto, sneak guardrails into must-pass appropriations bills, and then watch the whole mess land at a Supreme Court that already thinks "one person, one vote" is more of a suggestion. Meanwhile, census oversight is in the capable hands of people like Josh Hawley and Rand Paul, whose main contribution so far has been not answering emails.

The Constitution says count every person; Trump’s crew says count every Republican advantage. The 2030 census is being treated less like a basic function of government and more like another gerrymandering tool with better stationery. If they pull it off, whole communities will lose representation and funding — but on the bright side, the GOP will finally have a base that literally doesn’t count.

Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide who committed the unforgivable MAGA sin of describing reality under oath, will not be indicted, a grand jury has decided. Turns out that when you help Congress investigate an attempted coup instead of participating in it, some people still think you shouldn’t be the one facing criminal charges. This has been very confusing for the movement that believes the only real crime is disloyalty to Donald Trump.

The non-indictment is a tiny, flickering reminder that the justice system is supposed to go after the people who tried to overthrow the government, not the staffer who showed up, answered questions, and wrote a book about how completely unhinged it all was. While Trump’s orbit keeps insisting Hutchinson is the problem, the grand jury appears to have gone with the radical position that maybe the folks screaming "rigged election" while summoning a mob to the Capitol deserve a bit more scrutiny than the 20‑something aide who testified about it.

So Hutchinson walks away without charges, and the message to future aides is clear: if your boss is busy speed‑running authoritarianism, your best legal strategy is still "don’t help with the coup" and "tell the truth when subpoenaed." Naturally, this will be framed in MAGA media as more proof the deep state is out to get them—because in Trump’s America, accountability for the powerful is a witch hunt, but indicting a cooperating witness would have been "law and order."

America’s ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, has apparently decided that his job description is less "diplomat" and more "international arsonist with a flag pin." In a closed-door meeting, he reportedly told business leaders that if Republicans lose key midterm races in places like Maine and Michigan, Trump might just blame Canada. Because when your policies are wildly unpopular, why not accuse the country that gave the world maple syrup of rigging Michigan?

Hoekstra has been busy turning the U.S.–Canada relationship into a low-budget reality show. He’s called Canada’s 2025 election "anti-American," described Trump’s fantasy about making Canada the 51st state as a "sign of affection," and ranted at Ontario’s trade rep for daring to run anti-tariff ads featuring Ronald Reagan. Now he’s accusing Canadians of "election interference" for criticizing illegal U.S. tariffs on American TV, while telling them to "keep your nose out of American politics"—a bold line from a guy who treats Canadian domestic politics like his personal talk-radio call-in segment.

Canadian officials, including prime minister Mark Carney and industry minister Mélanie Joly, are politely pointing out that this is all nonsense, which in Trumpworld probably counts as further evidence of a hostile foreign plot. Foreign policy experts note that Hoekstra seems less interested in managing tensions than in manufacturing a pretext for Trump’s domestic failures. Meanwhile, U.S. voters are increasingly connecting tariffs, the trade war and the cost of living, and wondering why the White House decided to turn a friendly neighbor into a campaign villain instead of, say, fixing anything.

The U.S. embassy insists his remarks were "grossly taken out of context," which is diplomatic code for "yes, he said the thing, but please stop quoting it back to us." As Barack Obama recently joked, Canada is now being treated as a "well-known evil empire"—apparently the first empire in history whose primary weapons are politeness, hockey, and an insufficient willingness to pretend Trump’s trade tantrums are genius 12‑dimensional chess.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein, 92, has died, removing from the stage one of the dwindling number of people in American public life who could still say "no" to a president without immediately auditioning for a cable news contract. In his final act, he was juggling the U.S. criminal case against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro while simultaneously telling Donald Trump that, no, paying off a porn star and cooking the books is not a "core Article II power." A true radical: he thought the presidency came with duties, not a punch card of felony coupons.

Hellerstein had already ruled against Trump’s attempt to weaponize the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans, then spent years as a highly unwelcome speed bump on Trump’s road to total legal impunity. When Trump tried to yank his New York hush-money case into federal court under the grand legal doctrine of "being president means never having to say you’re guilty," Hellerstein responded with the heresy that reimbursing Michael Cohen for hush money to Stormy Daniels is not, in fact, a constitutional function. Even after the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity gift basket forced him to reconsider, he still held that the trial evidence didn’t touch presidential immunity. The man literally kept telling Trump the law applies to him, twice.

Now he’s gone, and the Maduro case will just get reassigned to another judge who, as one former prosecutor put it, mainly needs to be good at reading lots of paper. Comforting, in a bleak way: the system’s bar for "one of the main qualifications of being a judge" is "can process PDFs," while the bar for being president is "can remember your own name most days and are willing to threaten democracy on the others." Hellerstein spent three decades trying to drag that imbalance a millimeter toward sanity. The Trump orbit will not miss him. The rule of law probably will.