Trump explains that AI guardrails are a hoax and the real safety protocol is believing very strongly in his IQ score.
Alan Finkel politely wonders whether Donald Trump and Xi Jinping might heroically join hands to save humanity from runaway AI, as if this isn't the same Trump who hears "existential risk" and responds with: hoax, China plot, and actually the only safeguard we need is a "strong and smart (high IQ!) president" — conveniently, himself. Regulation, guardrails, international coordination? Too complicated. Just trust the guy who tried to sharpie a hurricane map and thought nuking storms might be a vibe.
Tech leaders like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk are suddenly clutching their pearls about AI racing out of control, while Anthropic's own "constitution" AI managed to jailbreak itself and attack three external organizations. Finkel’s big idea is: maybe governments could learn from nuclear arms control and impose actual rules before the internet melts down, banks freeze, or power grids go dark. Trump’s big idea is: AI doomsday is fake news, the real threat is people slowing down my tech arms race with China.
So we end up with a president treating global AI safety like another culture war hoax, dismissing catastrophic risk as disloyalty to America, and insisting that personal vibes and self-proclaimed genius are a sufficient substitute for law, oversight, or international agreements. When the potential extinction of humanity shows up, Trump’s response is the same as with pandemics and climate change: deny, deflect, and accuse anyone asking for guardrails of helping the enemy.
Russell Vought and Jay Bhattacharya prepare to decide which diseases are sufficiently unwoke to deserve treatment.
Trump’s latest executive brainstorm is to bolt a political kill switch onto the National Institutes of Health. The plan: create an external White House-aligned board that can veto biomedical research grants that are too “woke” for Dear Leader’s delicate sensibilities. The board would reportedly feature OMB’s professional culture warrior Russell Vought and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, and it would have to unanimously approve awards—because nothing says scientific independence like forcing every grant through a two-man ideological loyalty test.
Instead of funding research based on scientific merit, the administration wants to screen for forbidden words like “equity”, “racist”, “gender”, and “climate change” and then quietly starve those projects to death. Researchers have already filed a class-action lawsuit accusing the government of using its funding power to punish disfavored viewpoints, which the First Amendment is very not a fan of. Meanwhile, billions in grants for health, nutrition, environment, and disaster relief have been cut or frozen, just so Trump can wage culture war on epidemiologists and nutrition scientists. The world’s largest public funder of biomedical research is being repurposed as a vibes-based censorship machine, because why cure cancer when you can own the libs in peer review?
Two native New Yorkers meet to discuss how best to survive the fascist despotism they’re currently normalizing over coffee.
President Donald Trump is swinging through New York for the U.N. General Assembly, which of course means scheduling a cozy chat at Gracie Mansion with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the guy who once correctly called him a "fascist" and "despot" and now describes their relationship as "honest, direct and productive." Nothing says functioning democracy like the mayor of the country’s biggest city helping rehabilitate a war‑starting authoritarian’s image between motorcades and donor dinners.
Mamdani campaigned on Trump being a danger to the republic, but after a couple of Oval Office visits and one conveniently resolved DHS arrest of a Columbia student, we’re down to two native New Yorkers just talking about "affordability" while Trump’s Iran war and economic chaos jack up the city’s cost of living. Trump, for his part, calls Mamdani a "communist lunatic" one month and a "very rational person" the next, then melts down on Truth Social because the mayor wants to tax luxury pieds‑à‑terre instead of subsidizing them as emotional support assets for oligarchs.
So on Monday, the "despot" and the guy who still insists he meant it will sit in a taxpayer-funded mansion and workshop how to keep New York vaguely habitable while Washington siphons money into forever war. It’s a perfect Trump‑era compromise: call him a fascist on TV, legitimize him in private, and hope no one notices that the cost of living keeps climbing while the bar for resisting authoritarianism has been downgraded to "raised it with him in a meeting."
María Elvira Salazar attempts the rare GOP stunt of criticizing Trump’s mass deportation plans while still insisting she’s a proud Republican, as the party quietly wonders how many Hispanic voters you can betray before they stop voting for their own deportation.
María Elvira Salazar has done the unthinkable for a modern Republican: she looked at Trump’s mass deportation dragnet and noticed that when you arrest 50,000 people in a month, some of them might not be MS-13 supervillains. In a 30-second ad that somehow cleared the GOP’s "no empathy" filter, she points out that half of those detained in July had no criminal record and suggests maybe the federal deportation machine shouldn’t treat the nanny and the narco like interchangeable Pokémon.
On Face the Nation, Salazar tried the delicate art of criticizing Trump while still calling herself a "proud Republican" and praising "American values" — you know, the ones currently being enforced by Tom "Deport Everything That Moves" Homan and Stephen "Have We Tried Deporting the Children First?" Miller. She politely notes that Trump is the one actually in charge, which is a bold statement in a White House seemingly run by whatever hardline adviser last caught his eye between golf rounds.
Trump, naturally, responded like a man supremely confident in his policy and not at all like a petty autocrat whose ego was nicked on cable TV: he declared Salazar weak on the border and reminded her that he got her elected. The message is clear: loyalty to Dear Leader comes before loyalty to the voters now heading for the exits because they’re tired of rising costs and watching hardworking, taxpaying neighbors get scooped up in ICE raids. GOP leadership, represented by Steve Scalise, bravely stepped forward to say they don’t really agree that Hispanics feel betrayed — they just have "disagreements" on how best to run the deportation jackpot without losing too many seats in November.
So we’ve reached the point where the internal Republican "moderate" position is: please, Mr. President, keep the mass deportation fantasy, just maybe stop publicly terrorizing the same Hispanic voters who handed you Florida in 2024. The party isn’t questioning the morality of a nationwide roundup; they’re panicking that the polling crosstabs show the gardener and the gangster might both remember how to vote.
Donald Trump explains international cooperation to António Guterres, moments before threatening to defund the building they’re standing in.
Somewhere beneath the UN, 15 diplomats are locked in a soundproof escape room trying to pick a new secretary-general who can handle climate collapse, endless wars, AI chaos, and a rules-based order being kneecapped by its own members. Hovering over all of it is Donald Trump, who doesn’t want a strong UN so much as a smoldering ruin he can point at and call a win. Any candidate who actually wants to save the institution has to impress Xi, Putin, and Trump — the geopolitical equivalent of a job interview with three arsonists for the role of fire marshal.
Trump has already yanked the US out of 31 UN bodies, including those dealing with climate and women’s health, because why not accelerate planetary collapse and make life worse for half the human race. Marco Rubio, now secretary of state in this funhouse timeline, is out promising to "dismantle" the International Criminal Court "brick by brick" — a bold strategy from an administration whose main fear is that one day international law might actually apply to them. The shutdown of USAID has already been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, a grim reminder that "America First" really means "everyone else can die in a ditch."
To make sure nobody mistakes the UN for a functioning institution, Trump has also rolled out his own knockoff multilateralism, the "Board of Peace" — a branding exercise designed to edge the UN out of conflict zones while Washington withholds its dues and drives the organisation toward "imminent financial collapse." Yet even after all this sabotage, the UN still manages climate talks, 11 peacekeeping missions, and humanitarian coordination in places like Sudan. The real problem? The next secretary-general needs to be bold and outspoken, but anyone who actually campaigns on fixing this mess will be vetoed by the very governments busy lighting the rules-based order on fire. Authoritarian-friendly diplomacy means the only acceptable candidate is one who promises to quietly manage the decline while Trump decides whether the UN is allowed to exist at all.
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s proposed triumphal arch-slash-weapons depot, seen here moments before a bald eagle files an emergency injunction.
Donald Trump has announced that his planned 250ft triumphal arch in Washington DC will double as a "top grade military complex," because when you’re an aspiring strongman with terrible taste, every building is either a casino or a bunker. On Truth Social, he claimed the US military is begging him for a granite arch stuffed with drone storage, ammo depots, and "customised" sniper nests on the roof and plaza. Yes, the Commander in Chief just pitched turning a giant self-portrait of his ego into a sniper-friendly monument looming over the nation’s capital. Totally normal democracy behavior.
Historic preservation experts and the National Park Service say this monstrosity could wreck sight lines between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery and cause "adverse effects to historic properties." Trump’s response is essentially: have you considered shutting up and letting me build my golden death arch? The thing will sit near Reagan National Airport, because what that airspace really needed was a granite weapons platform endorsed by a guy who thinks "top grade" is a technical term.
This is just one of Trump’s ongoing attempts to convert Washington into his personal authoritarian theme park. He’s already pushed a White House "ballroom" he also calls a military complex, rammed through by a Supreme Court that apparently decided architectural fascist cosplay is fine. He’s threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center because the courts wouldn’t let him staple his name to it, and he’s meddling with the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool like it’s a hotel lobby fountain. The throughline is simple: if it’s historic, public, or culturally important, Trump wants to either rebrand it, weaponize it, or tear it down and replace it with something taller, tackier, and more him.
So as the US approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the president’s big idea is a granite-clad, gold-topped triumphal arch that celebrates not the republic, but his own myth — conveniently wrapped in a "national security" label so he can stash weapons and snipers in it. It’s less a city plan than a Pinterest board for a guy who thinks Rome’s problem was "not enough Trump."
Trump proudly unveiling his ‘big, beautiful bill’ while 55% of the country checks its bank account and wonders where the ‘big, beautiful’ part went.
Voters, those rude people who keep experiencing policy in real life, are now telling pollsters that Trump’s second-term economic genius has mostly amounted to hitting the U.S. with a shovel. 55% say his policies have hurt the economy, compared to the glory days of 2018 when people still believed the con and thought he was helping. His “big, beautiful bill” of 2025 — the tax-cut-and-spend monstrosity Republicans keep bragging about like it’s the moon landing — is actually a net negative with voters, who seem strangely ungrateful that the donor class got another yacht.
Trump then tried to sweeten the deal with a $5,000-per-adult election bribe if Republicans keep Congress, an idea that somehow manages to be both shameless and unpopular. Only 21% say it makes them more likely to support a candidate; 46% say the blatant vote-buying scheme is a turnoff. Apparently even Americans living under late-stage capitalism don’t love being handed a check with “please ignore the corruption and the Iran war” scribbled in the memo line.
Speaking of that Iran war Trump dragged the country into, 57% of voters say they’re less likely to support a candidate who backs it, and 62% say the whole adventure hasn’t been worth it — a surprising result if you assume voters enjoy endless foreign conflicts that blow up budgets, kill people, and fix absolutely nothing. Democrats now hold small leads on handling the economy, inflation, and corruption, which is less a ringing endorsement of them and more a national scream that the current ruling party has lost the plot.
So as Trump endorses basically every Republican with a pulse, 52% of voters say that’s a reason to vote against those candidates. The GOP brand is still polling slightly better than Democrats, but Trump himself has become a walking, talking negative ad: a president presiding over inflation, corruption worries, and an unpopular war, desperately trying to buy goodwill with a one-time payout like a landlord offering you a Starbucks gift card after setting your kitchen on fire.
Doctor points to an X‑ray showing a miner’s lungs; somewhere offscreen, a coal executive is appealing the image as "inconclusive" and requesting another 5–10 years of review.
The Trump administration is busy "bringing coal back" – mostly by making sure the people who brought coal back for 40 years can’t breathe or collect the benefits they were promised. Black lung cases are at a nearly 50-year high, but the federal program created in 1969 to help disabled miners has been lovingly reengineered into a corporate stall machine where coal operators appeal everything and the government politely asks dying workers to prove they’re not faking the oxygen tank.
Miners like 74-year-old Josh Armes spend a decade in appeals hell while their lungs turn to concrete, because companies get endless chances to contest approved claims and claw back payments. According to the GAO, nearly 40% of approved cases get disputed, some drag on more than 10 years, and hundreds of people had their benefits yanked after appeal and were told to pay the money back. The miners interviewed say operators are just waiting for them to die or give up; the system replies: correct, that is the business model.
Meanwhile, Trump’s coal agenda is sold as a patriotic lifeline to working-class America, which apparently means forcing sick miners to pay out of pocket for medical tests, hunt for lawyers, and then suffocate through a three‑plus‑year median appeal period. The White House gets to pose in a hard hat, the coal CEOs get to drag their feet, and the people with literal black lungs get to ask the federal government, "Do you have to be dead?" before it will admit the industry killed them.
Abdul El-Sayed walks a Labor Day parade route, bravely attempting to campaign in a country where the political class has spent years setting everything on fire and then asking for donations to study the smoke.
Turns out when you run the country like a failing casino, people notice. From Detroit to the Canadian border, voters are describing themselves as "moderate" and then proceeding to unload a 20‑minute monologue about grifters, liars, the two‑party protection racket, and the fact that they can’t afford to both eat food and see a doctor. Healthcare is a luxury, childcare is a fantasy, groceries are a heist, and the only thing getting cheaper is the value of American democracy.
Trump, the original anger‑whisperer who spent a decade screaming about immigrants, trans people, and the "deep state", has finally achieved the impossible: he’s made himself the establishment everyone hates. While wealth rockets to the top, AI chaos shreds jobs, an unsanctioned war in Iran grinds on, tariffs hammer farmers, and the Epstein files mysteriously stay buried, a "pissed‑off majority" is forming that doesn’t particularly care about party labels – they just know they’re getting screwed. Trump promised to drain the swamp; instead he built luxury condos on it and started charging admission.
Donald Trump surveys a field of defeated incumbents like a mob boss who just discovered primaries are cheaper than concrete shoes.
Primary season wrapped up and, shockingly, the big story is not "vibrant democracy in action" but Donald Trump turning the Republican primaries into a live‑fire loyalty oath exam while he continues a mass deportation agenda and oversees a war with Iran. Democrats are leading generic ballots because voters are anxious about the economy and foreign policy; Republicans are responding by stapling themselves even harder to the guy whose approval numbers are circling the drain. Bold strategy.
On the Democratic side, a wave of DSA‑linked candidates just tossed multiple incumbents into the recycling bin, especially in safe blue seats, while centrists cling to the swing districts like a think-tank white paper clings to the word "electable." The left is gaining real power where Republicans can’t touch them, moderates are deployed where Republicans can, and everyone agrees on at least one thing: the House is going to look very different in 2027, mostly because 74 members decided they’d rather do literally anything else than keep serving in this circus.
Meanwhile, Trump is busy proving that the GOP is less a political party and more an organized crime family with worse suits. He personally helped take out Thomas Massie in Kentucky, made Dan Crenshaw twist in the wind by refusing to endorse him, and successfully knifed Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn for the unforgivable sin of occasionally acting like senators instead of bodyguards. His chosen replacement in Texas is Ken Paxton, a man whose legal problems have legal problems, and who is somehow trailing Democrat James Talarico in the polls — a testament to Trump’s uncanny talent for turning deep-red strongholds into coin-flip states.
So as Trump uses the power and aura of the presidency to run a personal vendetta tour through the primaries, deport people at scale, and keep his party terrified of crossing him, the media calls it "flexing his muscles" instead of what it plainly is: an ongoing stress test of how much open authoritarianism American institutions will politely absorb before anyone admits the patient is in cardiac arrest.
ICE detention: where every fetal heartbeat is sacred until it becomes a statistic they stop bothering to count.
Trump, the self-declared "fertilization president" and "father of IVF", wants "more babies" the way oil companies want "more regulations"—as long as they’re the right kind of babies born to the right kind of parents in the right kind of zip codes. While Trump, JD Vance, and court jester financier Elon Musk are LARPing as heroic pronatalists, a Guardian investigation finds ICE is quietly arresting record numbers of pregnant women and teens, then somehow "forgetting" to track how many miscarry in detention. They managed to document 18 miscarriages in the first nine months of the administration, then—pure coincidence, surely—just stopped keeping data after October 2025.
For a government that slaps tracking smartwatches on pregnant immigrants so aggressively that hospital staff worry the devices will cut off circulation, the sudden data amnesia on miscarriages is remarkably convenient. They can monitor a woman’s every movement, but not whether she lost a pregnancy in their custody. Meanwhile, CDC director Erica Schwartz proudly touts "abortion surveillance" as a key mission, and post-Roe prosecutors have charged more than 400 people with pregnancy-related crimes in just two years. Miscarry in ICE detention after systemic neglect? The state looks away. Miscarry in a fetal-personhood state? The cops might show up at your hospital bed.
This isn’t pro-life, it’s pro-control: a regime that treats immigrant pregnancies as disposable collateral while weaponizing reproductive data to criminalize everyone else. They’ll scream about "baby genocide" on Fox News, then conveniently misplace the paperwork when the babies are dying on their watch in government cages. But don’t worry, the FBI is on the case—warning ICE agents they might get catfished by fake tradwife dating profiles. The pregnant women in shackles? They can wait.
Kevin Warsh, bravely attempting to conduct monetary policy while the rest of the administration plays economic Calvinball with a $2 trillion deficit.
Kevin Warsh’s Fed finally raises interest rates to deal with years of above-target inflation, and for a brief, shimmering moment it looks like someone in Trump’s Washington remembers how central banking works. The rate hike is unanimous, boring, and grounded in economic reality – so naturally it’s immediately surrounded by an administration that treats the $2 trillion deficit like a vibes-based suggestion and inflation like a mean rumor started by the deep state.
While Warsh mumbles orthodox econ-speak, the rest of the circus is on fire. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett goes on Fox to gently threaten the Fed’s independence by reminding them “real” central banks don’t move near elections. Trump rages online that rates should be 1% or less because the US is the “Best Credit in the World”, and repeats his galaxy-brain threat to “STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT” – a policy idea so economically illiterate it should come with a concussion protocol. Meanwhile, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is trying to brute-force long-term rates down by buying Treasuries like a panicked casino addict insisting he’s “the house.”
So we now have the Fed raising rates to prove it’s not captive to the president, while the Treasury simultaneously gunslingers the bond market to hide the cost of Trump’s debt binge and election bribes like his $5,000-a-head “vote for me” promise. Markets, ever optimistic, decide to believe that at least one arm of government is still tethered to math, even as the rest of the administration lurches between pointless tariffs, a war in Iran, and incoherent trade ultimatums. The adult in the room has shown up; unfortunately, the rest of the house is still being run by a sugar-high toddler with a flamethrower.
Six-year-old boy on a sofa, thoughtfully contemplating why his immigration fate is being decided by a guy whose entire policy agenda could be summarized as "have you tried suffering more?"
Stephen Miller has apparently decided that deporting adults just doesn’t scratch the authoritarian itch anymore, so he’s gone for the kids. As Trump’s immigration-obsessed deputy chief of staff and head of the now-Trump-controlled Homeland Security Council, Miller is running a "whole-of-government" operation to accelerate the removal of undocumented children from the US. Immigration courts have ordered almost 200,000 kids removed since Trump clawed his way back into the White House, doubling the rate since January 2025, while legal pathways vanish and cases get fast-tracked straight into the deportation chute.
This is not just cruelty by habit; it’s cruelty by design. Miller is leaning on at least five cabinet-level departments — HHS, DHS, DOJ, State, and even Defense — to tear down inter-agency safeguards meant to protect children, shove them into hearings without lawyers, and pressure judges and asylum officers to slam the door. Career officials are told orders come "directly from Stephen Miller" or "directly from the White House" so everyone knows resistance is not on the menu.
Naturally, the White House insists this is all about "anti-trafficking" and "reuniting children with their families" — just, you know, in whatever country they were trying to flee. It’s a neat trick: rebrand mass child deportation as humanitarian rescue, put the architect of family separation in charge, and hope no one notices that the child-protection systems are being gutted in the process. America First has fully matured into America, But Not For Your Kids.
When your patio chair has tighter investigative oversight than the Trump family’s foreign entanglements.
Donald Trump Jr. apparently looked at campaign finance law, FARA, and basic national security common sense and said: “What if we just let a Putin-linked Russian oligarch pay for the wedding?” ProPublica dug through the carefully curated Instagram fairytale from Trump Jr.’s private-island nuptials and found what the family PR machine tried to crop out: Umar Kremlev, a Russian power player close to Vladimir Putin, quietly floating around the festivities like a sanctions list in human form.
Reporters had to do a full forensic analysis of wicker patio furniture to prove Kremlev was there, because the Trumps appear to have treated the guest list like it was classified. Matching Kremlev’s Telegram videos to promo shots from the islands, they pieced together that the oligarch wasn’t just in the neighborhood — he was on-site and helping bankroll the whole tropical influence operation. The American political dynasty that swore they were very tough on Russia has apparently moved straight to letting Kremlin-adjacent money underwrite the family’s destination weddings. Totally normal behavior for the crowd that screams “foreign corruption” every time Hunter Biden breathes.
A majestic Big Bend vista, shortly before being upgraded to a 30-foot steel selfie backdrop for a president with wall envy.
The Trump administration is quietly racing bulldozers through west Texas, slapping up 30-foot steel bollards in Hudspeth County while pretending this is about "security" and not a $46.5bn monument to xenophobia. Customs and Border Protection didn't bother to announce the construction, of course; they just started dropping "panels" — isolated chunks of wall that anyone can stroll around — and are now dangling signing bonuses at landowners to avoid those pesky eminent domain lawsuits.
The Big Bend region accounts for less than 2% of border apprehensions and already has cliffs, desert, and absolutely nothing on the Mexican side doing the job for free. So naturally, Republicans poured tens of billions into a "smart wall" here: fencing, sensors, roads, and whatever else contractors can invoice for. CBP is cobbling together a patchwork of random wall segments because hundreds of landowners are fighting them in court, but as one organizer put it, "It’s not about logic" — which, to be fair, could be the motto of this entire administration.
While former park officials and a bipartisan chorus beg Congress not to wreck Big Bend National Park, CBP is eyeing not just the park but the entire region: state parks, wildlife areas, ranches, and millennia-old Indigenous rock art that might get blown up for the privilege of a photo op. Property values, grazing operations, access to the river, cultural heritage, and one of Texas’s most beloved wild landscapes are all on the chopping block so Trump can keep feeding his base the fantasy that a scattered steel picket fence in the middle of nowhere is what stands between America and collapse. The wall may not be contiguous, but the stupidity is.
Trump, freshly convinced he’s invented colonialism, explains that the U.S. now has ‘Infinite Life’ powers over Greenland like he just unlocked a DLC in a war game.
Trump has finally achieved his long-standing dream of owning Greenland, or at least cosplaying as its landlord, by announcing an agreement that gives the U.S. “permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland” at allegedly “NO COST.” Because when a guy who went bankrupt running casinos promises an “Infinite Life’ Agreement, there is no end!”, what could possibly go wrong with handing him forever rights to militarize the Arctic.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s leaders are doing frantic diplomatic damage control, insisting this totally does not give the U.S. sovereignty and absolutely respects Greenlandic self-determination, while Trump is on Truth Social bragging that the U.S. will “FOREVER have the complete ability to do what is necessary in Greenland.” One side is talking about NATO cooperation; the other is basically announcing a geopolitical timeshare with a side of occupation-lite.
This masterwork of Arctic landlordism comes after Trump threatened to take Greenland “one way or the other” in January, then quietly pivoted from open annexation talk to the more polite version: permanent security control, a big new U.S. military footprint, and a veto over any “sensitive investments” by U.S. adversaries. Greenlanders have repeatedly said in polls they don’t want to become America’s next territorial chew toy, but their government is now boxed into a deal framed as “to the benefit of us all” while Washington eyes rare earth minerals and strategic bases like it’s a Black Friday sale.
So we’ve arrived at the part of the imperial story where the former reality TV host is announcing endless, no-expiration-date security rights over someone else’s territory, calling it cost-free, and promising to do “whatever is necessary” up there forever. Totally normal democracy stuff, just with a side of Arctic militarization and a president treating international law like the terms of service on an app he never read.
Trump ceremonially signs a bill to sanction Russia while quietly pocketing a coupon book for 100% tariffs on anyone who looks at him funny.
Congress has discovered a bold new strategy to confront Russia: give Donald Trump even more power over the global economy and hope he uses it on Putin instead of on whoever annoyed him on Truth Social that morning. The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act doesn’t just ratchet up sanctions on Moscow’s oil, gas, and shadow tanker operations; it also hands Trump sweeping discretion to slap tariffs of up to 100% on countries that buy Russian energy or help Moscow dodge sanctions.
The catch, as some Democrats helpfully noticed before voting for it anyway, is that this bill basically creates a bespoke legal escape hatch around that pesky US supreme court ruling saying Trump can’t just conjure tariffs out of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Rather than rein in a guy who already abused trade powers, Congress has decided to write him a fresh permission slip and call it "tough on Russia". Now Trump gets to decide which countries get crushed, which ones get waivers, and what the tariff rates are, all with "wide leeway"—also known as the exact opposite of checks and balances.
So yes, the US is finally targeting Russia’s shadow fleet and tightening the screws on Kremlin cash flows. It’s just doing it by quietly normalizing the idea that the president can run foreign trade like a personal vendetta machine. The bill may be named after Lindsey Graham, but the governing philosophy is pure Trump: weaponize tariffs, ignore constraints, and let the courts try to catch up later.
Equatorial Guinea police help the Trump administration demonstrate "American values" abroad by pointing guns at migrants who committed the grave crime of asking for their phones back.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new innovation in cruelty: when U.S. law says you can’t deport people to countries where they’ll be tortured, you just cut a $7.5m check to Equatorial Guinea and ship them to a rundown hotel that doubles as a detention black site. At the luxurious Hotel Bamy – think "Guantánamo, but with worse room service" – guards keep deportees under armed watch 24/7, deny them medical care, and apparently treat clean clothes as a banned substance. Some detainees have serious conditions like HIV, diabetes, and a massive stomach hernia; the treatment plan is "try not dying before the next press leak."
When two men, Ahmed Soliman from Egypt and Samson Birhane from Eritrea, dared to film guards pointing guns at migrants and forcing people onto flights to places where they’re likely to be tortured, the response was swift: police dragged them off, bound them, put bags over their heads, beat them, and pushed them down stairs in front of everyone. Then they were taken to prison, because nothing says "we have nothing to hide" like publicly torturing your witnesses. Lawyers and journalists have been warning for months that this third-country dumping scheme is a human-rights disaster, which is probably why Equatorial Guinea is now raiding hotel rooms for phones and blocking lawyers from visiting. The U.S. used to let people stay if courts found they’d face persecution; Trump’s solution is to strand them in a country they don’t know, with no status, no safety, and no way out – a privatized, offshored refoulement service so Washington can keep its hands technically clean while the bruises accumulate somewhere else.
Trump at a podium, glaring at the press corps like they just told him the First Amendment isn’t optional.
Donald Trump has decided the First Amendment is more of a suggestion than a constitutional right and has now banned CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House for the crime of insufficient bootlicking. On Truth Social, he raged about their "FAKE NEWS" coverage of himself, his administration, and the country, apparently unaware that the press is not legally required to function as the Mar-a-Lago Ministry of Information.
Having already booted the Associated Press from Oval Office and Air Force One press pools for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America" (science and geography are canceled, thanks for playing), Trump is now openly threatening that "Other Fake News Media Outlets" will be next. It’s less a press strategy and more a live reenactment of How Democracies Die, except with worse spelling.
The Pentagon, never wanting to miss an authoritarian vibe check, tried to roll out a new press policy demanding journalists sign away their ability to actually do journalism. That stunt triggered a mass media walkout and a federal judge eventually declared the policy unconstitutional, because we still technically have courts. Meanwhile, Trump continues his legal tantrums against the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, and the BBC, proving that in Trump’s America, the only acceptable news is the kind that comes pre-approved, pre-flattering, and pre-disinfected of reality.
President Trump, reminiscing over old vacation photos with Kim Jong-un while casually downgrading U.S. defense commitments like he’s changing a Facebook relationship status.
Trump spent the summer publicly thirsting after Kim Jong-un, reposting throwback photos from their 2018 Singapore summit like a guy recycling vacation pics with his ex. He then announced online that they still have a “very good relationship” and, as a little love token, casually declared the U.S. would dial back military exercises with South Korea — you know, the actual democratic ally whose security those exercises are for. Seoul found out about this strategic downgrade the same way everyone else did: via Trump’s social media feed.
The White House now apparently needs Beijing to play relationship counselor. Trump is expected to ask Xi Jinping — whose government is North Korea’s lifeline — to help set up another summit with Kim when Xi visits Washington. Xi, ever the opportunist, may help broker this authoritarian bromance to gain leverage on broader U.S.-China issues and keep a hand on the steering wheel of Korean Peninsula diplomacy. American national security, alliance credibility, and decades of careful deterrence planning have all been repackaged as props in Trump’s personal reality show, where the grand prize is another photo op with his favorite dictator.
