President Trump has heroically announced that he has slain the terrifying Biden "EV mandate" by approving new fuel economy standards that magically make it easier to keep cranking out gas guzzlers. The Biden-era rule nudged automakers toward electric vehicles by setting pollution limits that are hard to meet if your business model is "what if tailpipes, but forever." Trump’s solution is to simply lower the bar so pollution standards don’t inconvenience oil companies or carmakers who never met a short-term profit they wouldn’t torch the planet for.
This is pitched, of course, as a win for "consumer choice" and "freedom," because nothing says freedom like higher fuel costs, more air pollution, and supercharging climate disasters for your kids. Rather than push industry toward cleaner tech that already exists, the administration is yanking the steering wheel back to 1973 and flooring it, while insisting this is all about helping working Americans. The reality is less populist uprising, more regulatory gift basket to fossil fuel donors wrapped in a bow of performative anti-Biden spite.
So the U.S. will lag further behind on EV adoption, automakers get yet another signal that long-term planning is for losers, and the planet gets a little warmer so a few executives can squeeze out another quarter of record profits. Trump calls it ending a mandate; everyone else can call it what it is: a deliberate choice to pollute more, innovate less, and pretend that physics and atmospheric chemistry are just another part of the deep state.
RFK Jr., anti-vax crusader turned Health Secretary, seen here overseeing the CDC’s transition from public health agency to abandoned strip mall.
The American Federation of Government Workers just dropped the fun fact that the CDC has lost one-third of its workforce in the first year of Trump 2.0. That’s not a reorg, that’s a controlled demolition. Entire offices—like the Office of Health Equity and the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity—weren’t just downsized, they were erased, because why would a government openly flirting with eugenics need anything as gauche as equity or equal employment protections?
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a name that somehow manages to undersell how unserious and destructive it is—already chainsawed the place in 2025. Now, after the initial bloodbath, thousands more have simply quit or retired rather than hang around for RFK Jr. and new CDC Director Erica Schwartz’s grand experiment in vibes-based epidemiology. Human resources is at 2 percent staffing, which really streamlines the process of turning a federal health agency into a political prop: no HR, no paperwork, no witnesses.
What remains, according to former CDC official Demetre Daskalakis, is a “zombified” agency that can’t be bothered to respond to measles, food-borne outbreaks, or rabies, and has managed to give no guidance at all on a newly FDA-approved flu vaccine. The CDC’s vaccine advisers—the people who used to tell doctors what to do so people don’t die—haven’t met once this year. Under Trump and RFK Jr., public health has been downgraded from ‘core government function’ to ‘optional side quest.’
The union politely calls this the “dismantling of public health infrastructure.” A more accurate description: the administration is stripping the smoke detectors out of the house while lecturing everyone about personal responsibility as the kitchen fills with gas. The CDC is being turned from a world-class health agency into a hollowed-out monument to killing-democracy and forever-grifting, and the American people get to be the control group.
Donald Trump emerged from the UN circus to announce that he personally rejected Iran’s latest proposal, because of course the guy who bankrupted casinos is now the final word on nuclear talks and maritime chokepoints. Iran’s offer? Reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart nuclear negotiations within a week if the U.S. lifts its naval blockade, eases oil sanctions, and stops helping turn the region into a live‑fire demo for weapons contractors. The U.S. response, as relayed by anonymous chest‑thumpers: Iran "doesn't control the strait" so it doesn’t get to make demands about the thing it is currently helping shut down.
Instead of seasoned diplomats, the U.S. delegation is headlined by Jared Kushner and real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, because when you’re juggling nuclear issues, regional ceasefires, and the global oil supply, what you really need is the guy from 666 Fifth Avenue and his developer buddy negotiating on the sidelines like they’re refinancing a mall. Qatar runs messages between Kushner, Witkoff, and Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi while Trump stands offstage yelling that he rejected everything, and some poor anonymous official insists talks are still "positive and constructive" as long as you ignore the blockade, the sanctions, and the war.
Meanwhile, the administration proudly notes that around 60 million barrels of oil have squeaked through the Strait of Hormuz in 72 hours under U.S. military protection – a fun way of saying "we’ve militarized a global shipping artery and we’re calling it stability." The whole thing is a masterclass in Trump-era foreign policy: treat a multi-country war, nuclear proliferation, and the global energy market as a branding exercise, let the real estate guys run point, and hope no one notices that the world economy is dangling from a strait we’re pretending one side doesn’t control.
The White House proudly announced that the U.S. and China will launch a "U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue"—because if you're going to gamble with civilization, you might as well slap a focus-grouped catchphrase on it. Trump, who has repeatedly said the only thing that matters in AI is "beating China," is now very bravely acknowledging that Beijing is actual competition while simultaneously rebranding the entire field like it's a new energy drink.
Instead of building real guardrails, the administration is rolling out a "bilateral communication channel for SI incidents," basically a Cold War red phone for when the algorithms start doing war crimes on their own. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—because when you think existential AI risk, you obviously think Treasury—apparently spent his pre-summit time working on this hotline, though nobody can explain what qualifies as an "incident" or what either side is actually required to admit to.
So we now have a president who doesn’t understand AI, a rival autocracy that uses it for surveillance and repression, and a shiny new "SI" label slapped on top of all that. What could go wrong when the same crew that broke pandemic response, trade policy, and basic diplomacy is now workshopping brand names for the technology that might automate global chaos?
Molly London, surrounded by perfectly harvestable trees and a perfectly broken trade policy.
Trump’s great economic master plan — slapping tariffs on Canada, America’s polite lumber roommate — is working exactly as intended: small logging businesses in Maine are shutting down while Republicans brag about how much they love trees and jobs and definitely not Canada. Molly and Alex London, who ran a logging business for nearly a decade, spent the summer watching their equipment sit idle because replacement parts got too expensive or disappeared from local stock thanks to tariff-induced price hikes. After years of rising costs, they finally shut it all down, because nothing says 'America First' like making it impossible for Americans to afford American work.
Meanwhile, Maine’s logging industry, a literal centuries-old backbone of the state’s economy, is now a barometer for how badly the trade war plus record diesel prices are gutting rural communities. Democrats are hoping that this slow-motion economic collapse will finally convince voters to retire Susan Collins, who’s been in the Senate since roughly the Paleozoic era and is still branding herself as the humble girl from Caribou with lumber roots while functioning as a dependable vote for the same wealthy elite whose policies are crushing those roots. Republicans get to posture about toughness on trade; loggers get shuttered businesses and idle machines.
Collins’s opponents are racing to introduce themselves as actual working-class humans rather than Senate furniture. Troy Jackson is leading with 'fifth-generation logger' like a flashing sign that says, 'I have touched a tree that wasn’t part of a photo op.' Democrats tried this play in 2020 with Sara Gideon tying Collins to Trump and the donor class, and voters re-elected Collins anyway while voting for Biden, proving that split-ticket voting is alive, well, and still allergic to consequences. Now, with Trump’s trade war grinding on and the costs "just getting worse," Maine’s loggers get to learn the hard way that symbolic tariffs make great Fox News segments and terrible business plans.
Kaepernick kneels peacefully during the anthem, triggering a presidential meltdown and a multi-year Republican cosplay of ‘defending freedom’ by demanding people be punished for using it.
Colin Kaepernick is out here a decade later still getting up at 4:30am to train like he has a playoff game on Sunday, while the NFL owners who quietly blackballed him are mostly just trying to remember which diversity statement they posted in 2020. His new memoir walks through how a quarterback sitting on a cooler during the anthem turned into a national moral panic, a global protest movement, and a full-blown Trump tantrum — complete with the future president demanding that a private employer punish a player for peaceful speech because it hurt his feelings and his merch sales with racists.
The league closed ranks, sponsors clutched pearls, and Trump rode the outrage all the way to the White House podium, where he helpfully modeled authoritarianism for the kids by telling owners to fire anyone who dared kneel. Kaepernick, meanwhile, quietly kept training, organizing, and refusing the one thing this crowd can’t stand: an invitation to legitimize Trump with a photo-op. As he puts it, refusing to meet Trump was an “easy no” — which, to be fair, is also what NFL owners have been telling his agent for ten years, just for slightly different reasons.
So here we are: the quarterback who protested police killings and systemic racism is still ready to play, and the guy who screamed that kneeling was treason is now a movement leader for people who think the Constitution is optional if they’re mad enough. Kaepernick got turned into a global symbol of resistance; Trump got a bunch of fans who confuse forced patriotism with freedom. One of them still believes in the promise of this country. The other one just wants everyone standing on command like it’s a pregame North Korea.
Midwestern Republicans are suddenly discovering that Trump’s Iran war isn’t just a Fox News backdrop, it’s an actual war that makes gas and diesel prices go kaboom in places like Iowa, Michigan and Ohio. After years of cheering on "tough" foreign policy from a safe distance, they’re now sprinting to microphones to demand a "quick end" to the conflict their party helped greenlight, as if this is a Netflix show they can just stop mid-season.
What’s really lighting the fire under all this newfound moral clarity? Not the dead Iranians, displaced civilians, or long-term regional chaos — just the terrifying prospect of angry voters staring at $7 diesel and wondering why their grocery bill looks like a ransom note. The GOP brain trust that waved through Trump’s chest-thumping now fears they might actually have to own the consequences of letting a reality TV president play commander-in-chief. Shocking development: endless war and economic pain are slightly less popular when it’s your own constituents footing the bill.
So the heartland Republicans are trying to pull a classic D.C. magic trick: support the war, oppose the fallout, and hope voters forget who handed Trump the matches. They’re not rejecting the underlying authoritarian impulse or the idea that a president can casually drag the country into yet another Middle East disaster; they’re just annoyed the timing is bad and the poll numbers are worse. Call it what it is: the leopards-ate-my-face caucus, now begging the leopards to maybe just nibble around the edges until after Election Day.
Polls show Trump’s approval hitting fresh basement levels, which is impressive given how much time he’s already spent tunneling. Even Republican support is eroding, as some GOP voters apparently glanced up from the culture-war circus long enough to notice the economy looks like it’s been managed by a man whose primary financial experience is bankrupting casinos.
Republicans are staring down the midterms with a standard-bearer who is less popular than food poisoning, but still firmly in control of the party because nothing says "strong, values-based movement" like being held hostage by a guy whose main policy innovation is rage-posting before sunrise. The polls are a warning sign for the GOP, but the party’s answer so far appears to be: double down on the guy driving the bus off the cliff and yell "fake news" at the altimeter on the way down.
So yes, Trump’s numbers are terrible. The catch is that the entire Republican strategy for a decade has been to build a personality cult around a man who thinks accountability is a hoax. Now the bill is coming due, and the party’s big idea is to hope voters don’t notice that their lives are worse, their institutions are weaker, and their "leader" is just a walking, talking reminder that this is what happens when you treat democracy like a reality show.
Trump’s America: here’s your federal support for the arts—one owl drawing and a court injunction, now stop talking about history and gender.
The Trump administration looked at tiny, competitively awarded arts and humanities grants and thought: what if we used these couch-cushion pennies as an authoritarian loyalty test? So organizations across the country got charming surprise emails saying their already-approved National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities funds were canceled midstream because they no longer matched "new federal priorities"—also known as "whatever Trump’s culture war needs this week." Archaeologists excavating a long-forgotten Black neighborhood in Nashville? Ordered to drop the shovels and go home. Community studios, museums, researchers: same message—stop working, the Dear Leader needs that money for vibes.
Courts then did the extremely radical thing of applying the law, ordering NEH to reverse the mass cancellations and smacking down the NEA’s crusade against so-called "gender ideology." Some funding is limping back, but there’s no retroactive money for projects that were kneecapped, and the administration is appealing both rulings because of course it is. The plan here is obvious: starve independent culture, reward compliant propaganda, and make everyone else so scared of losing funding that they self-censor. It’s arts policy by tantrum—less "supporting American creativity," more "paint what we like or we cut your lights."
Emmanuel Macron, politely explaining that 'annihilating countries' is not actually a foreign policy, while Trump mentally storyboards the movie poster.
Donald Trump showed up at the UN to deliver his usual fanfic about America’s unmatched greatness, this time helpfully musing about whether to just “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly” after seven months of war with Iran. Because nothing screams "responsible global leadership" like casually workshopping war crimes in front of the General Assembly while insisting the US rules the planet by divine Yelp review of its GDP and nukes.
Then Emmanuel Macron took the mic and, in his farewell tour as president, tried something radical: defending international law and saying maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t run the planet on the "whoever has the biggest missile wins" model that Trump, Putin and Netanyahu are so fond of. He called out western double standards, asked whether we want "the law of the jungle" or a "civilised international society", and generally reminded everyone that the rules-based order existed before Trump decided it was a personal obstacle to his brand.
Shockingly, other leaders noticed. A procession of "middle powers" — Australia, Spain, the Nordics, Canada, etc — started using their own UN speeches to take coded swings at Trump’s global wrecking-ball routine. Finland and Norway launched a new AI safety group directly challenging Trump’s line that AI risks are a "hoax", and 27 leaders signed up, apparently tired of outsourcing humanity’s survival to a guy whose policy compass is whatever gets a standing ovation at a Florida rally. Meanwhile, the UK is busy calculating how many international initiatives it can skip to avoid upsetting Dear Leader in Washington.
What emerges is this cheery picture: Trump is busy dismantling the old order and waving around threats of annihilation, while everyone else tries to hurriedly invent "values-based realism" — ad hoc alliances of states who still think treaties, human rights and not nuking people on a whim are worth something. Macron may be a lame duck at home, but at the UN he basically left behind a shared spine and a post-it note saying: “Use this to stand up to the guy trying to turn global governance into his personal WWE storyline.”
The Trump White House has reportedly told CNN to take the Greyhound, barring its journalists from joining the press pool on Air Force One for Trump’s little campaign-adjacent field trip to a college football game in Knoxville. CNN was supposed to be the rotating TV pooler this weekend — you know, the normal system every functioning administration uses so the press can cover the president, not just the ones who say nice things about his crowd size.
Instead, the administration appears to have decided that access to the president’s official travel is a loyalty reward, not a public responsibility. That’s not just petty; it’s the kind of petty that wanders right up to the First Amendment, pokes it in the chest, and asks what it’s going to do about it. Government officials using taxpayer-funded planes while handpicking only friendly cameras is less “free press” and more “state TV, but make it SEC-themed.”
This is what passes for media strategy in Trump’s America: CNN can still cover the trip, of course — just from outside the bubble, stripped of the access it was scheduled to have, because the president doesn’t like their tone. Totally normal behavior for a guy who swears he loves the Constitution, right up until it tries to sit in coach on his plane.
Trump proudly announces he has solved government waste by simply not following the parts of the budget he doesn’t like.
Trump has once again discovered that if you ignore a law long enough, it starts to look like a suggestion. This time, he’s "pocket rescinding" nearly $1 billion that Congress already approved and he already signed, including $567 million for refugees, asylees, and other migrants, plus more money for immigrant aid, HUD programs, and something the White House helpfully rebranded as "Woke International Education" so Fox chyron writers wouldn’t sprain anything.
Instead of going through the normal, legal rescission process under the Impoundment Control Act, the White House is using the end-of-year timing trick: notify Congress right before the fiscal year ends, sit on the money until it expires, then call it "cutting wasteful and harmful spending" that supposedly doesn’t benefit Americans. The Government Accountability Office has a shorter term for this: illegal.
When you’ve lost Susan Collins, you’ve really… mildly inconvenienced yourself. The Republican chair of Senate Appropriations says OMB "intentionally withheld" funds for months to pull off this unlawful cancellation and promises to "work with colleagues" to address it, which in Collins-speak usually means a strongly worded letter and a sad furrowed brow on Face the Nation. Democrat Rosa DeLauro is less delicate, accusing the administration of trying to "steal more money" promised to communities. Hard to argue, given this is the second round: last year Trump yanked $4.9 billion in foreign aid the same way, and the Supreme Court let it slide on foreign-relations grounds without touching the basic question of whether the maneuver torches budget law.
So Congress passes the spending, Trump signs it, then his team quietly refuses to spend it and lets it die on the vine while calling it a "historic action" against waste. The constitutional power of the purse is now apparently subject to the presidential power of ¯\(ツ)/¯.
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.
