schrödinger’s nato: trump’s alliance that’s both dead and extorting you
European leaders peer into Schrödinger’s NATO box, hoping Trump hasn’t replaced collective defense with a billable-hours schedule.
European leaders are apparently living in a quantum thought experiment where NATO both exists and doesn’t, depending on whether Donald Trump woke up wanting to help defend Europe or shake it down like a mob boss with nuclear weapons. The European Council on Foreign Relations politely calls this a “Schrödinger’s NATO” moment; the less polite version is: the continent’s security now hinges on the mood swings of a guy who once tried to blackmail Ukraine for dirt.
While Vladimir Putin tests how much of Ukraine he can chew off, Europe is heroically responding by… letting French and German defense contractors torpedo a £100bn joint fighter-jet program over who gets to hoard the tech and the glory. As Spain’s defense minister dryly notes, it’s not ideal when Dassault’s ego outranks Europe’s security. Meanwhile, everyone keeps buying US F-35s that only work as long as Washington feels like letting them, and the US is already leaning on Italy over its AI air defense project to make sure the gravy train of dependency keeps flowing.
Brussels is trying to duct-tape together a response with a new EU defence industrial strategy and €150bn in cheap loans, plus a patchwork of side deals like the UK–Finland–Netherlands procurement club. And yet, even as G7 leaders trek to Evian to sweet-talk Trump into maybe pressuring Putin this week, the editorial’s whole subtext is: Europe either grows up and stops relying on flattering an aspiring autocrat, or it keeps gambling its survival on the hope that the guy who loves strongmen suddenly decides to stand up to one.
#national-security#killing-democracy
trump takes civil rights out back behind the school
Behold the Department of Education, now serving as a very expensive sign holder while its functions are scattered to agencies that would rather be doing literally anything else.
The Trump administration has decided that the best way to "help" kids with disabilities and students facing discrimination is to blow up the part of the government that’s supposed to protect them. Special education programs, which oversee $15 billion a year and enforce the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, are being yanked out of the Education Department and dumped into Health and Human Services. The Office for Civil Rights — the people who’ve spent decades enforcing anti-discrimination laws in schools — is being shipped over to the Justice Department, where civil rights complaints can go to die in a nice, quiet backlog.
Disability advocates and a coalition of Democratic attorneys general say this little game of bureaucratic musical chairs is not just cruel, but also probably illegal without an act of Congress. Naturally, the administration is selling it as "efficiency" and "better results for students," because nothing screams student success like decoupling services for disabled kids from the civil rights protections they rely on, and handing enforcement to a DOJ that treats civil rights like an optional elective. The Education Department isn’t abolished yet, but Trump is clearly testing how much of it he can dismantle by executive tantrum while the courts try to keep up.
#killing-democracy#anti-science#trumps-america
trump’s small business ‘boom’ needs life support
A small business owner heroically trying to stay optimistic while the ‘greatest economy ever’ eats their margins for breakfast.
The National Federation of Independent Business optimism index just slid to 95.3, its lowest level since October 2024, erasing almost all of the post–Trump-reelection sugar high. Turns out you can’t run an economy on vibes, tax cuts for donors, and press releases about how everything is ‘the greatest in history’ while small business owners watch their costs go up and customers disappear.
Instead of MAGA prosperity, the Guardian notes that small business owners are now mostly worried about taxes, inflation, and labor costs, with 29% saying they can’t fill jobs — a fun combo of wage suppression, policy chaos, and general second-term Trump instability. The same administration that promised to ‘unleash’ Main Street has basically unleashed a questionnaire asking, ‘So how bad is it, exactly?’ while pretending this isn’t what happens when you prioritize stock tickers and donor portfolios over actual local economies.
The Guardian is now collecting stories from small business owners about how they’re limping along in Trump’s economy — cutting hours, raising prices, praying the next executive tantrum doesn’t nuke their supply chain. The official line from Trumpworld is still that America has never been stronger; the data, and the people trying to make payroll, are politely disagreeing.
#money#trumps-america#forever-grifting
rule of law, now with bonus courthouse sex scandal
Federal courthouse, where justice is blind, ethics are optional, and HR would like a word about whatever just happened in chambers.
America’s majestic federal judiciary continues its quest for public confidence, this time via Judge Eleanor Ross, who managed to combine courthouse sex, partisan politics, and lying to investigators into one tidy disciplinary package. Ross received a “private reprimand” after an investigation found she had sex with a high-ranking uniformed police officer in her chambers within earshot of staff, attended a partisan event, and then initially lied when someone had the nerve to ask if any of that actually happened.
Ross just recused herself from a Georgia election-records case after the DOJ gently suggested that maybe, just maybe, the judge who went to an event for Fulton County DA Fani Willis — the same Willis who prosecuted Donald Trump over his 2020 Georgia antics — might not be the ideal neutral arbiter for a fight over the state’s voter list. In her order, Ross said she was stepping aside “out of an abundance of caution for the potential perception of bias,” which is a very polite way of saying: if you’ve been disciplined for partisan mingling and creative truth-telling, you probably shouldn’t be anywhere near a case tied to Trump’s election mess.
So the DOJ is suing Brad Raffensperger for an unredacted statewide voter list, Trump’s Georgia racketeering case has already been tossed, and the judge in the latest Georgia election skirmish is exiting stage left under the shadow of a sex-and-ethics scandal we only learned about because it leaked past the “private” part of her reprimand. The rule of law is technically still standing, but it’s definitely not wearing its robe correctly.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
trump admin decides climate data is illegal, starts deleting the ocean
Trump-era ocean policy: if the data shows the planet’s on fire, unplug the thermometer and toss it overboard.
The Trump administration looked at a $386m ocean monitoring network that tracks climate change, extreme weather, and marine ecosystems and said: what if we just destroyed it? The National Science Foundation, facing a proposed 55% budget cut from Trump’s 2026 budget, quietly ordered most of the Ocean Observatories Initiative torn out of the water by 2027 – no scientific review, no real warning, and, according to House Democrats, no legally required notice to Congress. Just a casual federal agency speedrunning "how to make your own appropriation law violation" while calling it a "descoping" aligned with "evolving priorities".
Sen. Jeff Merkley called the plan "supreme stupidity" and a violation of the constitutional balance of powers, which is a polite way of saying the executive branch is taking congressionally funded infrastructure and treating it like Trump treats NDAs. Merkley and Republican Lisa Murkowski led a bipartisan letter demanding NSF stop dismantling the system and actually consult scientists before ripping out 900 sensors that have produced a decade of publicly available climate and ocean data. House Democrats went further, telling NSF to halt this "expensive, destructive, and – crucially – illegal" action, noting that instead of using a world-class monitoring network during an approaching El Niño, taxpayers now get to fund boats to sail around the ocean yanking out perfectly good instruments.
This is all part of Trump’s broader campaign to defund, gut, or otherwise kneecap anything that measures reality: slashing climate research, bleeding NOAA and EPA, and rolling back emissions rules while dismantling the systems that could prove how bad it all is. If you were trying to make sure coastal communities, fishermen, and emergency responders had less information about storms, heatwaves, and ocean conditions, you’d do exactly what this administration is doing. Why fear rising seas when you can just delete the data and pretend beachfront Mar-a-Lago will be fine forever?
#anti-science#killing-democracy
paramount discovers the first amendment has a 'no hurting the boss's feelings' clause
Paramount headquarters, where conflicts of interest are bad unless they involve a Trump-friendly billionaire buying half the media landscape.
Paramount Skydance took a bold stand for press freedom by refusing to air an ad about... press freedom. The Freedom of the Press Foundation tried to buy a 30-second spot during a UFC broadcast on Paramount+ that criticized CBS’s billionaire owners, their merger with Warner Bros Discovery, and their increasingly Trump-friendly posture. The ad called out CBS leadership for allegedly demanding “falsehoods and bias to appease Trump” and warned that Trump wants his pals the Ellisons to scoop up CNN too. Paramount’s response: this is a “conflict of interest.” Translation: you can criticize anything you want, as long as it’s not us or our favorite aspiring autocrat.
Once the network saw the actual creative, the deal mysteriously died two days before airtime. A Paramount sales rep politely explained that the ad couldn’t run but cheerfully offered to help them craft some other, less inconvenient truth. Seth Stern from the Freedom of the Press Foundation pointed out the obvious: Ellison won’t air criticism of himself, his company, or his buddy Trump, which is a fascinating approach for a media empire that pretends to care about journalism. Meanwhile, the merger that would hand CNN, HBO, and more to Ellison just got the blessing of Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, because of course it did. Regulatory hurdles remain abroad, but inside the US, the message is clear: if you don’t like Trump’s censorship-by-oligarch, you’re welcome to complain about it on your own website, far away from his newly consolidated media playground.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
trump spends $14.2m to lose fight with algae
Heroic federal workers attempt to manually remove $14.2m worth of Trump-branded algae from a national monument.
Donald Trump looked at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool – site of MLK’s "I Have a Dream" speech – and decided what it really needed for America’s 250th birthday was to be repainted "American flag blue" like a tacky hotel swimming pool. So the administration quietly handed a no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia company whose main qualification appears to be working on a pool at one of Trump’s golf clubs. The price tag ballooned from Trump’s claimed $1.8m to more than $14.2m, because of course it did.
Naturally, the "highly sophisticated" industrial-strength materials that Trump bragged would last 100 years were defeated in under a week by algae, which has apparently not yet pledged loyalty to the regime. The water is green again, National Park Service staff are out there with skimmers like underpaid pool boys for a failing casino, and the Interior Department is issuing straight-faced statements about miracle "nanobubbler technology" that has supposedly "fixed" the pool forever – while reporters can literally see the slime.
So we now have a historic civil rights landmark treated as a personal rebranding project, a fattened no-bid contract to a Trump-adjacent vendor, and a federal agency doing propaganda copy about bubbles to thank the president for "fixing" a problem that is visibly not fixed. The algae is the only thing in this story doing honest work.
#forever-grifting#corruption#money
one big beautiful lifetime of debt
Artist’s impression of the American dream, now with 30-year repayment terms and no refunds.
The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act is finally delivering on its promise: turning student loans from a bad dream into a permanent lifestyle. Thanks to a Republican AG–driven court ruling, Biden’s SAVE plan – the one that tried to keep millions of people from drowning in debt – gets taken out back on 1 July. In its place, borrowers are treated to stricter timelines, less forgiveness, and a repayment maze designed by people who, as one advocate politely put it, clearly have no idea how any of this works.
Instead of early forgiveness and reduced payments, millions will be shoved into older plans that make you pay more, for longer, with forgiveness arriving sometime between "never" and "hope you enjoy Social Security." Anyone who doesn’t navigate the paperwork fast enough gets auto-dumped into fixed plans that usually offer exactly zero forgiveness but do ensure your payments are high enough to keep your landlord, your grocery bill, and your anxiety in direct competition.
The Department of Education insists this is all about “simplicity,” which is an adorable way of saying: if you take out a loan, we will squeeze you for 20–30 years and call it personal responsibility. New borrowers get two shiny options: a 30-year plan based on gross income (not what you actually live on) and a tiered plan that stretches payments up to 25 years. Students are already reconsidering grad school, homeownership, and basic life milestones, because nothing says "land of opportunity" like treating education as an albatross you finance until you die.
#killing-democracy#money#forever-grifting
department of government efficiency kills 14 million to balance musk’s vibes
Elon Musk announces another round of ‘efficiency gains’ next to a giant shredder helpfully labeled ‘foreign aid’ and ‘democracy’.
Elon Musk has officially become the world’s first trillionaire, which in our brave new timeline means he doesn’t just buy social media platforms on a whim, he buys governments. After turning Twitter into a one-man Super PAC to shove Donald Trump back into office, Musk is rewarded with his very own quasi-cabinet fiefdom: the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE), because of course the future of public policy is a meme coin.
Once in charge, Musk does what every tech libertarian dreams of between ketamine microdoses: he shuts down USAID. Not trims it, not reforms it—shuts it down. Programs fighting malnutrition, HIV, and preventable diseases around the world? Gone. A Lancet study estimates these "efficiencies" could mean more than 14 million deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five. But hey, the line on the spreadsheet looks cleaner, and nothing says "small government" like using state power to annihilate global health programs while one guy sits on $1 trillion.
Gabriel Zucman points out that this is not some abstract "virtual" wealth story; this is what happens when extreme wealth fuses with an authoritarian-curious presidency: one man’s net worth becomes a planetary death panel. Meanwhile, retirees get their winter fuel allowance cut in the UK to save £1.5bn, while about 1,000 ultra-rich families could cough up ten times that every year with a modest 2% wealth tax and still be obscenely rich. Instead, we’re running a global Hunger Games where the Capitol is Mar-a-Lago plus SpaceX HQ, and democracy is whatever’s left after the trillionaires finish shopping.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy#forever-grifting
white house fight night: racism on the south lawn
UFC Fight Night at the People’s House, where the dress code is black tie and 4chan talking points.
For his 80th birthday, Donald Trump celebrated the dignity of the presidency by turning the South Lawn into a UFC-themed Facebook comments section. Fighter Josh Hokit grabbed the mic after his bout and used his big moment to recycle a far-right, racist, sexist, and transphobic conspiracy theory about Michelle Obama, yelling: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” Trump’s contribution to this historic moment was a helpful half-smirk and total silence, while parts of the crowd laughed like they’d just discovered YouTube in 2012.
Even Trump allies are now gingerly suggesting that maybe, possibly, the president should denounce hosting open bigotry on the literal White House lawn. Dave Portnoy — who endorsed Trump — said this was the one thing that needed an immediate condemnation. Dana White, professional chaos merchant, managed to find the line and texted that he’s “completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families,” which is a sentence no one expected to be the adult in the room. Meanwhile, Sunny Hostin and Robert Griffin III patiently explained that calling Black women “men” has a long, ugly history rooted in racism and misogyny, a history that was just treated as a punchline at a taxpayer-funded event.
Not everyone on the right saw a problem, of course. Dan Bongino rushed in to declare it all just comedy and to accuse critics of “pearl clutching,” because when your guy is hosting racist smears at the White House, the real issue is tone policing. This all comes only months after Trump shared — then quietly deleted — a video depicting the Obamas as apes. The White House declined to comment, because why interrupt the message when the silence is doing such a fantastic job of telling you exactly where the presidency stands.
#racism#trumps-america#killing-democracy
trump threatens to repossess dc like a used timeshare
Trump contemplates whether Washington DC is a city of 700,000 people or just another property he can put back on the federal auction block.
Donald Trump popped into DC’s mayoral primary to remind everyone that democracy is conditional now. A week before the election, he mused that if democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George wins, he might just yank DC home rule and "run it on the federal basis"—because nothing says "small government" like canceling an entire city’s right to elect its own leaders. The message to Washingtonians: vote how you want, as long as it’s how Mar-a-Lago wants.
The candidates, to their credit, are at least pretending this is not normal. Lewis George talks about non‑negotiable DC autonomy and statehood while trying to find areas where she can still do business with the arsonist currently holding the matches. Kenyan McDuffie promises to "never back down" from federal interference, which is a bold claim given that Trump is literally on tape threatening to treat the nation’s capital like a misbehaving HOA. Both are scrambling to prove they’ll "stand up" to Trump while simultaneously navigating a donor ecosystem where a not‑insignificant number of contributors have also been writing checks to the guy threatening to put them under federal receivership.
Campaign finance drama adds the usual varnish of decay. Lewis George gets slapped with a $16,000 fine for allegedly cozy coordination with unions and calls the ruling "reckless" and riddled with errors, while she hammers McDuffie for accepting money from Trump-friendly donors. McDuffie counters that 99.9% of his cash is from Democrats and independents, which is a very precise way of saying, "yes, there are Trump donors here, but please focus on the decimal places." Over in the race to replace Eleanor Holmes Norton, Brooke Pinto is also doing the "just a few Trump donors" tap dance, because apparently in 2026 the capital of the United States needs a spreadsheet to track how much of its supposed representation is subsidized by people who’d happily revoke its right to exist as a self-governing entity.
So the stakes are simple: DC residents are voting on who will fight for their autonomy while the president openly toys with the idea of canceling that autonomy if he doesn’t like the result. It’s not just a local election; it’s a live-fire test of whether home rule is an actual right or just a lease Trump thinks he can terminate by tweet and YouTube clip.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy
g7 photo-op tour continues, diplomacy still missing
Trump at the G7, playing world leader dress-up while the rest of the table quietly Googles ‘how to contain a superpower in decline’ under their folders.
Trump turned up at the G7 in France to do what he does best on the world stage: wander around looking important while other leaders try to conduct actual diplomacy within a 50-yard radius of a live Fox News segment.
Instead of being the forum where the U.S. leads the democratic world, the summit looked more like a traveling Trump campaign backdrop: quick handshakes, stiff group photos, and a president whose main foreign policy achievement remains blowing up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and then acting surprised that the Middle East caught fire. NBC dutifully rolled the footage of Trump "meeting with world leaders" while the chyron politely declined to mention that most of them now treat Washington like a drunk uncle you still have to invite to holidays because he technically owns the house.
So yes, the president met with world leaders. Whether he represented the United States or just the Trump Brand International Grievance & Golf Consortium is, as always, left as an exercise for the viewer.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
kennedy center scrapes off the gum under democracy’s shoe
Workers delicately remove Trump’s bronze letters from the Kennedy Center, carefully preserving them for their next life as evidence exhibits.
Trump tried to turn the Kennedy Center into the "Donald J Trump and John F Kennedy Center," because nothing says respect for institutions like firing the existing leadership, stacking the board with loyalists, anointing yourself chair, and then slapping your name on the building like it’s a failing casino in Atlantic City. Staff were laid off, artists bailed, programming was gutted, ticket sales cratered, and the new board helpfully announced a two-year "renovation" shutdown that just happened to coincide with Trump’s political needs.
Unfortunately for the Orange Louis XIV cosplay, there’s this annoying thing called law. Only Congress can rename the Kennedy Center, and a federal judge noticed that turning a national arts institution into Trump Tower: Orchestra Pit Edition was not, in fact, legal. The court ordered Trump’s name stripped from the signage, website, and even officials’ signatures, and blocked the planned closure. The administration responded in peak coward mode: a giant tarp now covers the facade so workers can pry off the bronze letters in secret, like a regime trying to erase evidence of its own humiliation.
So while democracy fans gathered outside hoping to witness some good old-fashioned, fully legal iconoclasm, Trump spent his birthday watching UFC on the White House lawn with Cabinet lackeys, billionaire buddies, and assorted manosphere influencers—because of course the guy who tried to decapitate a major cultural institution celebrates with half-naked men in a cage. The tarp is still up, the letters are reportedly gone, and the blank space where "Donald J Trump" used to be is the most honest public art this administration has produced: a monument to failed vanity and a petty autocrat who can’t even stage-manage his own downfall in daylight.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
epa to planet: sorry, jeffery needs another gulfstream
Hilcorp CEO Jeffery Hildebrand, seen here politely waiting for his turn to ask the federal government if it could maybe regulate the atmosphere a little less and his bank account a little more.
The Trump EPA has discovered a bold new climate strategy: don’t reduce pollution, just redefine it as too annoying for donors. The agency is moving to gut methane rules on so-called "stripper wells"—rundown, low-producing oil and gas wells that barely cough up 6% of U.S. output but spew about half the sector’s methane. That’s the greenhouse gas that traps 80 times more heat than CO₂, but also, crucially, threatens the profit margins of one very important billionaire: Hilcorp owner and recent Trump mega-donor Jeffery Hildebrand.
Hildebrand, whose company is already ranked among the industry’s top methane polluters, suddenly discovered his inner political animal right after the Biden administration passed strict methane rules that would cost him real money. He then shoveled millions into Trump’s campaign, his wife got an ambassadorship, he got a front-row White House seat and a chance to promise billions for Venezuela he doesn’t actually operate in, and now—what do you know—a former Hilcorp lobbyist is in charge of rewriting the EPA’s methane rules. That ex-lobbyist is helpfully workshopping policy with industry groups bankrolled by Hildebrand, producing a rollback tailor-made to rescue 700,000 leaky stripper wells from the horror of basic oversight.
The result: Hildebrand’s profits go up, his planes keep landing at Dulles before dawn, and the rest of us get to enjoy the accelerated heat waves, droughts, and wildfires that come from letting ancient, leaky wells burp methane into the atmosphere. Climate advocates point out that shutting these wells would cut emissions roughly in half while sacrificing just 6% of production—an obvious win for the planet. But the Trump-era EPA has done the math and reached a different conclusion: the only emissions that matter are the ones coming from a billionaire’s checkbook.
#forever-grifting#corruption#anti-science
trump’s primary circus: fake electors, crypto cash, and a surplus of maga
Republican candidates line up to prove who loves Trump, dark money, and alternative elector slates the most, while democracy quietly backs toward the exit.
Democracy’s slow collapse has reached the product-testing phase, with Tuesday’s primaries serving as a focus group on how much authoritarian cosplay Republican voters actually want. In Georgia, Trump and Brian Kemp are fighting over which loyalist gets to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff: Rep. Mike Collins, who’s under a House Ethics microscope for allegedly misusing congressional funds on a staffer and his girlfriend, versus football guy Derek Dooley, who promises to "work with President Trump" while being marketed as a political outsider by the literal sitting governor. Collins, ever the eager subordinate, brags about writing the Laken Riley Act — the first immigration-enforcement bill Trump signed in his second term — like that’s not a giant neon sign flashing "we’re legislating off Fox News segments now."
Meanwhile, the Georgia governor’s runoff is a contest between Lt. Gov. Burt Jones — who earned his Trump endorsement by serving as a fake elector in 2020 — and billionaire Rick Jackson, who’s spent over $100 million trying to buy the title of "Trump’s favorite governor." Kemp, term-limited and suddenly very into continuity, backs the fake elector over the "outsider" he claims to love so much in the Senate race, because nothing says "respect for elections" like promoting a guy who literally tried to nullify one.
Alabama looked at this mess and said: we can launder some money through it. The GOP Senate runoff to replace Tommy Tuberville is awash in nearly $7 million in ads, with Rep. Barry Moore boosted by a crypto-industry-linked super PAC and Club for Growth cash, all breathlessly touting Trump’s endorsement like it’s a warranty sticker. Moore is being hit as a "D.C. swamp king" accused of "stolen valor," while his opponent Jared Hudson brands himself a "warrior who will fight alongside President Trump" — because apparently the job description for U.S. senator now includes LARPing as a member of Trump’s personal Praetorian Guard. The throughline in all these races is clear: pledge fealty to Trump, shrug at ethics probes and fake-elector schemes, let outside money flood the zone, and then call it "grassroots."
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting#crypto
homeland insecurity: dhs graduates from protecting elections to menacing them
Markwayne Mullin explains that, yes, the best person to safeguard U.S. elections is the guy who tried to overturn the last one.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin — a man who still thinks Venezuela stole the 2020 election despite Fox News paying $787 million to admit that was nonsense — is now in charge of "protecting" U.S. elections. What could possibly go wrong when the guy who tried to block certification on Jan. 6 is handed the keys to the election security apparatus?
Instead of partnering with states to secure the vote, DHS has become the thing election officials need protection from. Local officials across the political spectrum are refusing to share voter data or security information with the feds because they’re pretty sure Trump’s people will use it to target them or undermine any result Dear Leader doesn’t like. As one Republican former clerk put it, "They've brought the fox into the henhouse" — which is generous, since the fox usually at least pretends not to be holding a can of gasoline and a match.
Trump has already said he wants the federal government to "take over" elections, and his DHS point person for elections, Heather Honey, comes with her own greatest-hits reel of election disinformation. So the new model is simple: discredit past elections, install true believers like Mullin and Honey, then demand that states hand over the data needed to challenge or overturn future results. Call it election security the way arson is climate control.
America once worried foreign adversaries might attack our elections. Now the concern is that the Department of Homeland Security — led by a guy who helped feed the Big Lie and literally arranged conspiracy-briefings at Mar-a-Lago — is gearing up to do the job from inside the building. Mission accomplished.
#killing-democracy#fascism
turns out nonstop coup cosplay is bad for national pride
Steve Kornacki bravely explains, with charts, that years of coup cosplay, court-packing, and reality denial have somehow made Americans less proud of their country. Truly, a mystery for the ages.
Steve Kornacki, America’s most overqualified human spreadsheet, reports that American pride is at an all-time low, driven by a "massive" partisan divide. Apparently, when one party spends a decade insisting the country is a satanic hellscape run by pedophiles and stolen votes, people don’t walk away humming "God Bless America." Who knew.
Republicans, marinated in Trump’s permanent grievance tour, tell pollsters they love America but hate basically everything it does, while Democrats, after watching the Supreme Court auction off rights and Trump try to speedrun authoritarianism, are not exactly feeling the fireworks-and-apple-pie vibe either. The result: a country that still exists on paper, but whose citizens are increasingly split between "this system is rigged" and "this system didn’t rig hard enough."
So yes, American pride is cratering. When your recent civic highlights include a president trying to overturn an election, a Supreme Court acting as a theocratic wrecking crew, and a political movement that treats democracy as an optional feature, it’s less "shining city on a hill" and more "condemned building with a giant TRUMP sign bolted on the front."
#killing-democracy#fascism#full-stupid
trump turns doj into his 2026 oppo research department
Donald Trump thoughtfully considers which political rival’s family members to subpoena next, in his ongoing remake of the Justice Department as a personal hit squad.
Gavin Newsom says the quiet part out loud: Donald Trump allegedly told his pet Department of Justice to go find a crime on him and, for good measure, on his wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom too. Federal agents have reportedly been knocking on doors of family friends and former staff, Hoovering up records and "abusing the grand jury process" like it’s just another loyalty test at Mar-a-Lago.
This isn’t some one-off tantrum; Newsom helpfully notes he’s merely the latest addition to Trump’s ever-expanding enemies list, joining James Comey, Letitia James, Tim Walz and pretty much anyone who’s ever said "no" to him. The alleged logic is simple: Newsom might run for president, he keeps calling Trump a liar, so obviously the next step is to sic federal prosecutors on his inner circle. Democracy, but make it mob movie.
Newsom says he’s fair game but calls out the administration for probing his wife’s finances while right-wing media and GOP hopeful Steve Hilton brand the couple a "grifter family" for the crime of caring about equal pay and gender equity. So the Trump White House is reportedly using the DOJ to run opposition research on a potential 2028 opponent’s spouse while screaming about "witch hunts" into Trump’s own criminal cases. Truly a banner day for law and order.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump wants an illegal victory arch and maybe some criminal charges to go with it
President Trump lovingly cradles a scale model of the giant illegal ego-tower he wants taxpayers to build, presumably because Mount Rushmore wasn’t available for renovation.
The Trump administration is apparently so committed to speedrunning late-stage empire that it’s now trying to build a 250-foot triumphal arch to itself in Washington, D.C., and do it without that pesky thing called Congress. In a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and National Park Service officials, Democrats calmly explained that, no, you cannot just grab federal money and federal land and erect a giant monument to Dear Leader because you’re feeling victorious on main today.
Lawmakers spelled out that Team Trump would be breaking at least three laws: the Commemorative Works Act, a 1912 statute that literally says you can’t slap random buildings on federal land in the capital without explicit congressional approval, and the Height of Buildings Act, which caps D.C. structures at around 160 feet. The arch is 250 feet, because of course it is. Senator Angus King called the scheme “stone-cold illegal,” which is a polite way of saying, have you people even met a lawyer? Officials who plow ahead could face suspension, removal from office, fines, and even criminal prosecution — all to build a giant concrete participation trophy for a president who lost the popular vote. Again.
An Interior Department spokeswoman, unfazed, called Trump’s triumphal arch “a project that all Americans can be proud of,” which is certainly one way to describe a law-defying, ego-stroking monument that violates appropriations rules and the basic idea that Congress controls the purse. The administration is essentially test-driving whether it can convert the National Park Service into the National Shrine to Trump Service and dare anyone to stop them. Washington’s skyline used to be defined by the Capitol and the Washington Monument; Trump would like to add a towering reminder that the rule of law is now just optional décor.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
white house discovers new national security threat: math
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei politely explaining math to a government that thinks 'jailbreak' is a classified program and not just people being better at prompts than the Commerce Secretary.
The US government has decided that Anthropic’s new AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, are so terrifyingly powerful that foreign nationals must be kept away from them like they’re the nuclear codes instead of glorified autocomplete. After getting "verbal evidence" of a supposed jailbreak, the Commerce Department — now led by Secretary Howard Lutnick, because of course the guy who turned bond trading into a blood sport is in charge of tech policy — effectively forced Anthropic to suspend access while refusing to explain anything in public.
Anthropic is now being summoned to Washington to show its homework and beg for permission to turn its own tools back on, while the White House, Commerce, and the company all suddenly develop a convenient case of "no comment" syndrome. Tech security leaders from Nvidia, Zoom, Mercedes-Benz, and former government officials are reduced to writing open letters asking the administration to maybe try "an open, scientific and transparent process" instead of vibes-based national security panic. Meanwhile, the same government that wants to micromanage AI usage is already being sued by Anthropic over how its models can be used by the Pentagon, because nothing says responsible governance like secret restrictions, power plays, and policy made via rumor.
#national-security#killing-democracy#full-stupid
