trump’s pardon program continues to pay dividends
Kodak Black, proud graduate of the Trump School of Consequences Don’t Matter, arriving for yet another episode of ‘Why Did We Pardon This Guy Again?’
Donald Trump’s presidential pardon loyalty program is really aging beautifully. Kodak Black, the Florida rapper whose three-year federal gun sentence got wiped away in Trump’s final-day clemency spree, is back in court on a felony MDMA trafficking charge after police say they found a pink party pill and $37,000 in cash in a bag with his name on it near a children’s safety center. Truly the Founders’ vision for the pardon power: reality TV casting for future indictments.
The alleged setup reads like a deleted scene from a very stupid crime show: gunshots reported by a kids’ educational building, two luxury SUVs, the smell of weed, and a pink bag containing a pink pill, paperwork with his name, and enough cash to make a banker nervous. According to the warrant, Kodak first denied the bag was his, then asked officers to hand him the money because that part was apparently all business. The charge carries a mandatory minimum three-year sentence and up to 30 years, which is awkward, given that he already burned his get-out-of-jail-free card on Trump’s farewell celebrity clearance sale.
His lawyer insists the case has a “weak legal basis” and that any fingerprint is just from a totally normal bottle of prescription cough medicine, not from the fun candy that tested positive for MDMA. The defense line is basically: yes, that’s his bag, yes, that’s his fingerprint, yes, that’s his money, no, those are not his drugs, and also he wasn’t even in the car. Somewhere, Trump is probably nodding along and wondering if he can retroactively claim this as criminal justice reform.
Trump’s last acts in office included pardoning Kodak Black and Lil Wayne, loudly marketed as outreach to Black voters and hip-hop culture. Years later, one of those headline-grabbing pardons is back in the news attached to alleged drug trafficking near a children’s facility. Stellar vetting, impeccable judgment, and a perfect reminder that when you treat the pardon power like a fan-service cameo reel, the sequel tends to look a lot like this.
#corruption#forever-grifting
little marco discovers vertical video democracy
Marco Rubio pauses between dismantling norms and meeting the Pope to film a vertical audition tape for President of Whatever’s Left of This Republic.
Marco Rubio, current secretary of state and former Trump chew toy, has apparently decided that the best use of his taxpayer-funded day job is to turn White House press briefings into B-roll for a glossy, campaign-style hype reel. The video splices his official remarks, jets over the White House, and a patriotic slideshow of stock-photo America into a minute-long audition tape for 2028, all wrapped in a “hopeful vision” that bears no resemblance to the administration he works for.
Naturally, the court flatterers swoon. Laura Loomer calls it a possible launch video, Elon Musk silently boosts it like a bored oligarch tapping the “like” button on a new yacht, and a rotating cast of C-list conservatives and random influencers declare Rubio “presidential” because he can form sentences without threatening civil war. Even some Trump skeptics line up to praise his eloquence, as if the content of the speech matters more than the minor detail that he’s serving a president who is busy shredding the very “laws, norms, and dreams” Rubio name-checks.
Outside the fan club, a few people remember how selling your soul works. Joe Walsh and Garry Kasparov point out that Rubio’s soaring rhetoric about an America where you’re not limited by the color of your skin is being delivered on behalf of a White House that has spent years governing on exactly the opposite premise. Rubio isn’t resisting that project; he’s branding it. The administration gets a friendly, articulate face to front its attacks on democracy, and Rubio gets a slick vertical ad for his next promotion. Everyone wins, except, unfortunately, the country.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
john roberts discovers politics don’t count if you wear a robe
John Roberts explaining that the Supreme Court isn’t political, it just repeatedly rules in ways that entrench minority rule by sheer coincidence.
Chief Justice John Roberts went to Hershey, Pennsylvania — fitting, since the court’s credibility is melting faster than a chocolate bar on asphalt — to reassure everyone that the Supreme Court is “simply not part of the political process.” This, mere days after the court helpfully took a chainsaw to what’s left of the Voting Rights Act so GOP legislatures can crack apart Black districts and lock in minority rule for another decade or two. Totally not political, just nine neutral wizards reading vibes off the Constitution.
Roberts grudgingly conceded that, sure, some decisions might be “unpopular,” like gutting abortion rights, inventing presidential immunity so Trump can treat the Oval Office like a crime-friendly Costco, and using the shadow docket to fast-track mass deportations and the dismantling of federal agencies. But don’t confuse systematically empowering one party and one guy with politics, you peasants — that’s just the law, or at least what five to six conservative justices say the law is at 2am on an unsigned order.
Meanwhile, Ketanji Brown Jackson had the audacity to point out that the court is “unshackling itself” from precedent and restraint to grab power in the Louisiana redistricting case, which prompted Sam Alito — joined by Clarence “Luxury RV” Thomas and Neil “Originalism, But Make It Cruel” Gorsuch — to call her concerns “trivial” and “insulting.” Translation: how dare you notice the power grab while we’re in the middle of it. Roberts keeps insisting the court isn’t political, but the decisions keep looking like a Federalist Society wish list stapled to Trump’s second-term agenda.
Every now and then they slap down one of Trump’s tariffs to prove they’re totally independent, like a cartel occasionally burning a drug shipment for the cameras. The structure remains the same: a captured court, busily hollowing out voting rights, reproductive autonomy, and checks on executive power, while the chief justice goes on tour to explain that your lying eyes are the real problem.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump calls nato a paper tiger, then lights the match
Trump explains NATO strategy to Europe: a Sharpie, a map, and a threat to go home if they don’t clap hard enough.
Donald Trump has apparently decided that the best way to keep Europe safe from Russia is to scream at NATO, start a war in Iran, side with Putin on Ukraine, and then threaten to yank US troops out of Germany. He’s calling NATO a "paper tiger" and European governments "cowards" because they didn’t want to lend their territory to Operation Epic Fury — which sounds less like a military campaign and more like a Monster Energy flavor. For extra spice, the Pentagon is floating sanctions on allies who refused to turn their countries into Trump’s personal launchpad.
European leaders, who used to politely pretend this was all just a phase, are now gaming out the scenario where the US president simply shrugs at Article 5 while Putin nibbles on a Baltic border town. Germany is busy trying to become Europe’s biggest conventional army by 2039 (comforting timeline for a crisis that could start next week), while France is quietly offering an extended nuclear umbrella to non-nuclear EU states. When Donald Tusk is out loud wondering whether Washington will actually honor its NATO obligations, you know confidence in the "leader of the free world" has reached the "please don’t hang up on us" stage.
Meanwhile, the Iran war has drained US weapons stockpiles, leaving Europe told to expect years-long delays for crucial air defense and munitions. European arms makers are already maxed out, so the continent now enjoys the worst of all worlds: fewer US guarantees, no fast-track rearmament, and a NATO summit in Ankara where leaders are afraid to even mention their vulnerability in case Trump storms off in a huff. The alliance is reduced to hoping they can keep a US Supreme Allied Commander in place as a kind of nuclear emotional-support animal while they quietly design a backup security system behind his back.
So the "post-American" security debate in Europe is no longer an academic seminar; it’s a live-fire drill triggered by a US president who treats alliances like failed reality shows. NATO used to be about deterring Moscow. Under Trump, it’s about deterring Trump from detonating the alliance on camera. Strong work from the guy who ran on "America First" and ended up as Europe’s leading arms-control risk.
#killing-democracy#national-security#imperialism
if you delete the data, the cancer doesn’t count
A handy map of hazardous chemical facilities, which the Trump administration would prefer you replace with a blindfold and a prayer.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new public policy innovation: if the numbers make you look bad, just erase the numbers. From environmental hazards to public health to climate risk, agencies are quietly ripping out tools, datasets, and staff so that Americans can no longer easily find out whether their air will give them cancer, their neighborhood is about to flood, or their kids are going hungry. Apparently "small government" now means a government too blindfolded to notice what – and who – is dying.
Instead of typing your zip code into an EPA tool to see if you live next to one of 12,000 hazardous chemical facilities, you can now enjoy the authentic 1950s experience of driving to a handful of EPA "reading rooms" to flip through paper records – assuming you even know they exist, can take time off work, and speak bureaucrat. Black, Latino, and low-income communities who disproportionately live by these plants are being told, in practice, that their "right to know" is optional when it annoys petrochemical donors. If data is how a democracy sees itself, this is the government gouging out its own eyes and sending the bill to the public.
Experts warn that dismantling the country’s data infrastructure will cripple everything from FEMA’s extreme weather response to tracking deadly drugs to getting food to hungry families. Which is the point: if you can’t measure infant deaths, pollution, or climate disasters, you don’t have to fix them – and you certainly don’t have to admit they’re worst in the very communities Trump’s people label "woke." Federal data touch every corner of American lives, but the administration has decided some lives – and some facts – are just too inconvenient to count.
#killing-democracy#anti-science#forever-grifting
marco rubio sent to yell at the pope for not loving trump’s holy war
Pope Leo arrives to say Mass in Cameroon, presumably pausing between hymns to be "weak on crime" by suggesting maybe we *don’t* nuke Iran off the map.
Marco Rubio, now somehow Secretary of State in this expanded universe fanfic of American decline, has been dispatched to the Vatican to "have a frank conversation" with Pope Leo — translation: explain why the Vicar of Christ is being so rude about Trump’s U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and his occasional threats to wipe out an entire civilization. Relations between Washington and the Holy See are at a low point because the Pope has committed the unforgivable sin of saying war is bad and nukes are worse, while Trump has responded by calling him "weak on crime," "terrible for foreign policy," and accusing him of being basically pro–nuclear Iran.
The Pope, an actual Catholic, has patiently repeated that the Church opposes all nuclear weapons and that his calls for peace are, wildly enough, based on the Gospel. Trump, an occasional Bible prop-holder, has countered by going on right‑wing radio to insist Leo is "endangering a lot of Catholics" by not cheering on the bombing, because nothing says "defender of the faith" like escalating a regional war and threatening annihilation. Rubio is left to translate this into diplomat-speak, explaining that the president’s fear for "places that have a lot of Catholics" just happens to align perfectly with his desire to keep the Iran war humming along.
Pope Leo, for his part, says he has "no fear of the Trump administration" and is not interested in a public debate — which is fair, given that Trump’s idea of theology is posting a social media image depicting himself as Jesus Christ, then quietly deleting it when people notice he’s gone full messiah LARP. Leo has been touring Africa denouncing the "delusion of omnipotence" driving wars and calling Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization "truly unacceptable," which is about as close as a Pope gets to "this guy is a danger to humanity" in diplomatic Latin.
Rubio will also meet Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a Trump ally who nonetheless defends the Pope, because even Europe’s hard right can tell the difference between "conservative Catholic" and "nuclear-armed cult of personality." Trump, naturally, is furious that his European friends aren’t sufficiently excited about his Iran adventure. So the state of American diplomacy in 2026 is: the Secretary of State shuttling between a nationalist prime minister and a Chicago-born Pope, trying to sell a forever war as Christian duty while his boss screams online that the Bishop of Rome just "likes crime, I guess." Totally normal superpower behavior.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump’s immigration policy: now with extra tear gas for kids
Nothing says ‘homeland security’ like a federal agent yelling “Fuck yeah” while a cloud of gas rolls over a crowd with seven visible kids in it.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has discovered a bold new frontier in "border security": gassing children on their way to school. ProPublica identified at least 79 kids across the country who wound up wheezing, coughing, and in some cases struggling to breathe after ICE and CBP agents enthusiastically sprayed tear gas and pepper balls near homes, schools, cars, and protests. One CBP officer helpfully narrated the moment, cheering "Fuck yeah" and "Woo!" on body cam as white clouds rolled over a crowd that visibly included multiple children. Truly the measured professionalism you’d expect from an agency with near-military power and less oversight than a public pool lifeguard.
Judges in multiple cities have looked at this and basically said: this is excessive force and shows "deliberate indifference" to kids’ safety. Unfortunately, their power stops at city limits, so while a few courts tried to fence in the worst abuses, DHS just kept rolling the tear gas carnival into the next town. The agency’s policies are looser than many local police departments, its own inspectors general have flagged undertraining, and yet DHS insists everything is fine and that the real culprits are "agitators" and parents who dared to bring their kids near public space. When a 1-year-old was hit with pepper spray in a car and struggled to breathe, DHS called it a "disgusting pepper spray hoax"—a narrative that collapsed instantly under the weight of, you know, video evidence and sworn testimony.
Medical experts point out that children are especially vulnerable to these chemicals—smaller airways, faster breathing, closer to the ground where the gas pools—basically the canaries in Trump’s great law-and-order coal mine. The scale is so extreme that the closest comparison researchers can find is the chronic gassing of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank. So while DHS communications insist they "do NOT target children" and that officers use the "minimum amount of force necessary," the real-world record looks more like: tear gas first, blame the parents later, and hope no one notices the kids gasping for air through the patriotic haze.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness#anti-immigration
trump: global brand ambassador for fascism-lite
European far-right leaders lining up to look ‘moderate’ next to Trump, the political equivalent of standing next to a dumpster fire so no one notices you’re also on fire.
Viktor Orbán finally got tossed out by Hungarian voters who were tired of the corruption buffet and economic crater, not because they suddenly discovered a deep love of liberal democracy or immigrants. His replacement, Petér Magyar, is basically Orbán with better PR and a less obvious kleptocracy problem, which is why he’s keeping the anti-immigration stuff and just promising to steal less. So yes, the autocrat fell; the policies stayed and put on a fresh shirt.
Meanwhile, Europe’s far right is doing just fine, thanks. They’re in government in places like Italy and Czechia, leading polls in Austria and France, and being lovingly normalized by the supposedly "respectable" European People’s party, which now treats Giorgia Meloni’s Italy as a study-abroad program in border cruelty. Mainstream conservatives are borrowing far-right lines on climate, migration, and "the elites" while insisting they’re still centrist—sort of like insisting McDonald’s is health food because you ate it with a fork.
Trump’s role in all this? He’s the world’s loudest Overton Window crank. When the president of the United States is threatening to ditch NATO, annex Greenland, and slap tariffs on the EU between rants about "wokeness" and "the swamp", it makes every European mini-autocrat look downright reasonable. Meloni, Le Pen & friends get to pose as moderates simply by not live-tweeting their meltdowns. And because NATO’s own secretary general, Mark Rutte, treats Trump like a volatile donor he can’t afford to offend, whatever deranged thing Trump says stops being fringe and gets filed under "serious policy debate" instead.
So yes, Orbán’s fall is worth celebrating, and Hungarian voters did something heroic. But Trump’s ongoing presence as chaos-in-chief of the West keeps doing what it always did: normalizing the far right, laundering authoritarian ideas through "mainstream" institutions, and making radical-right leaders look like responsible adults just by standing next to them. The fascism isn’t gone; it’s just rebranding while Trump runs global quality control.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump asks taxpayers to pick up his $83 million tab
Trump, pondering which constitutional principle to hollow out next so he doesn’t have to write E. Jean Carroll a very large check.
Donald Trump is back in court, asking the 2nd Circuit to please hit pause on that pesky $83 million defamation judgment E. Jean Carroll won, so he can go beg the Supreme Court to declare that calling your alleged sexual assault victim a liar is an official presidential duty. Because when the framers wrote Article II, they clearly had "publicly smearing women who accuse you of rape" at the top of the job description.
The legal magic trick here is the Westfall Act: Trump wants his name swapped out for "The United States" as the defendant, which would make the case disappear since the government can’t be sued for defamation. Carroll’s jury award would go poof, and the message would be clear: if the president defames you while in office, congratulations, it’s now just a quirky feature of your democracy. Trump’s lawyers warn of "irreparable harm" to him if she’s allowed to collect, which is a poetic way of saying: he really does not want to pay this bill.
Carroll’s team, being far more practical than the former leader of the free world, says they’re fine with a pause as long as Trump posts an extra $7.46 million to cover interest while he tries to get the Supreme Court to turn presidential immunity into a full-service personal liability shield. And just to really drive home how warped this has gotten, the Justice Department—yes, your Justice Department—filed its own brief saying it sees "good cause" to ask the Supreme Court to help Trump offload his legal problems onto the American public. Apparently the new standard is: when a jury finds a president liable for defamation after an alleged sexual assault, the U.S. government’s role is to see if it can pick up the check.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
sebastian gorka discovers europe, declares it a terror petri dish
Sebastian Gorka, fresh from yelling at a map, explains that Europe is both the cradle of Western civilization and a terrorist daycare center, and somehow this makes sense to the Trump White House.
The Trump administration’s new counter-terrorism strategy, drafted by discount Bond villain Sebastian Gorka, declares that Europe has become an "incubator" for terrorism thanks to migration and those pesky "globalist ideals" like open borders and human rights. As a helpful bonus, the document gently informs the birthplace of Western culture that it must "halt its willful decline" — a normal thing for a US government strategy to say about its closest allies, and not at all the language of a collapsing ethno-nationalist movement trying to drag everyone else down with it.
The strategy also bravely expands the definition of "terrorism" to include "violent Left-Wing Extremists" such as anarchists, anti-fascists, and groups that are "radically pro-transgender" — because nothing says imminent national security threat like people insisting trans people exist and should maybe not be legislated out of public life. US counter-terrorism, it explains, will now "prioritize" neutralizing secular political groups whose ideology is "anti-American" and pro-trans, which is a polite bureaucratic way of saying: we are formalizing state repression of our domestic political enemies and calling it security policy.
Meanwhile, the administration has turned Latin American waters into a live-fire testing range, blowing up alleged drug-trafficking boats and killing at least 191 people so far, while pressuring regional governments to join the fun and militarize their own anti-drug operations. All of this is wrapped in the rhetoric of "unacceptable threats" and "measuring seriousness" of allies by how much muscle they contribute, as if Trump and Gorka are running NATO like a protection racket. Officially this is a counter-terrorism strategy; in practice it’s a mashup of forever-grifting foreign policy, militarized drug war carnage, and a handy new pretext to criminalize anyone to the left of Sebastian Gorka’s podcast audience.
#killing-democracy#fascism
fbi raids fulton ballots because trump lost there, obviously
A stack of Fulton County ballots wondering why they’re still being held hostage because one guy couldn’t handle losing in 2020.
The Justice Department gets to hang on to the 2020 Fulton County ballots the FBI scooped up from a warehouse, after a federal judge decided the seizure was "certainly not perfect" but still good enough for government work. Fulton County argued the grab was improper and unconstitutional, which is what you say when the feds walk off with your entire paper trail like it's a Black Friday doorbuster.
The DOJ claims it’s investigating "irregularities" in the 2020 election in Georgia’s biggest, bluest county — the same county Trump and his brain trust have been screaming about for years with absolutely no evidence, through three separate counts, including a hand recount, all confirming Biden won. The judge basically shrugged and said: yeah, the warrant wasn’t pretty, but Fulton didn’t prove its rights were trampled or that it actually needs the originals back, especially since DOJ gave them copies.
So now, thanks to Trump’s endless tantrum about losing Georgia, the federal government is still pawing through old ballots from an election that’s been confirmed more times than Trump has filed bankruptcies. Democracy is allegedly intact, the ballots are in federal custody, and the conspiracy theorists will now, of course, accept the results and move on. Sure they will.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
trump’s ‘law and order’ era now featuring live fire near the white house
Secret Service agents sprint past the Washington Monument, still somehow surprised that a government built on grievance, guns, and Fox News might have an incoming fire problem.
Washington, DC continues its run as America’s least-fun theme park as a 45-year-old Texan, Michael Marx, allegedly strolls along the route of JD Vance’s motorcade with a concealed gun, runs from Secret Service, opens fire, and manages to shoot a teenage bystander instead of the agent he was aiming at. Law enforcement shoots him multiple times, at which point he reportedly responds with the extremely stable policy position: “F—k the White House” and “Kill me, kill me, kill me”. Truly the spiritual offspring of a political culture that treats armed rage as a personality type.
While all this is happening, the White House briefly locks down because Donald Trump is inside hosting a “small business event” — presumably explaining to mom-and-pop shops how to dodge taxes and monetize the presidential seal. JD Vance’s motorcade route, a random teenager’s leg, and the Secret Service all get dragged into the chaos, because in this administration, everyone is an unwilling extra in the world’s worst prestige drama.
US attorney Jeanine Pirro, now apparently cosplaying as the face of sober federal law enforcement, vows to pursue the “most serious charges” against the man who brought gun violence “steps from the seat of our government and the path of the vice-president”. This, from a regime that’s spent years mainlining gun worship, demonizing political opponents, and flirting with insurrection like it’s a networking opportunity. The state that helped cultivate the climate is now shocked—shocked—to find bullets in the air.
All of this comes barely a week after another guy allegedly tried to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner armed with guns and knives and was charged with attempting to assassinate the president. So yes, the Trump-Vance administration’s great contribution to American civic life remains intact: a country where every political event is one unhinged man away from turning into a live-action security drill, while the people in charge keep pouring gasoline on the mood and calling it freedom.
#killing-democracy#national-security
trump turns brazil policy into the free jair bolsonaro fan club
Lula at a microphone, presumably wondering how he ended up negotiating trade policy with a man who tied tariffs to freeing Jair Bolsonaro like it’s some deranged frequent-flyer rewards program.
Donald Trump is hosting Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the White House to talk about the economy, tariffs, and organized crime, which is bold from a guy who just tried to run foreign policy like a Change.org petition for Jair Bolsonaro. The U.S. slapped a 40% tariff on Brazilian goods — on top of another 10% — and Trump later helpfully explained that his annoyance over Bolsonaro’s criminal charges was one reason for the economic punishment. Foreign policy, but make it personal legal grievance cosplay.
The two leaders have supposedly had a strained relationship, which tends to happen when the American president writes a letter demanding you go easy on your own country’s former far-right leader and then hikes tariffs when you don’t roll over. Now they’re meeting again so Trump can pretend this is about “shared economic and security interests” instead of his ongoing habit of turning U.S. trade tools into a loyalty test for fellow authoritarians and indicted buddies.
Trump claims he and Lula had “excellent chemistry” and that Lula “seemed like a very nice man,” which, given Trump’s track record, is somewhere between a curse and a threat. Lula shows up trying to talk about a pact against organized crime; Trump shows up having already used the U.S. economy as a pressure tactic to meddle in Brazil’s justice system. One of these is actual statecraft. The other is a guy running the White House like it’s a VIP lounge for embattled strongmen.
#killing-democracy#corruption
indiana gop learns the first rule of trump club
Indiana Republicans carefully selecting their next state senate: one (1) mapmaker, zero (0) scruples.
Indiana Republicans just got a live demonstration of how "small government conservatism" works in the Trump era: the White House demands an extreme gerrymander to erase the state’s last two Democratic House seats, seven GOP state senators say "maybe let's not openly rig the maps that hard," and now five of them are unemployed. Another may soon join them, courtesy of roughly $7m in Trump-aligned dark money and a campaign message that boiled down to: loyalty to Trump or GTFO.
The reward for refusing to help redraw the lines to carve up Rep. André Carson’s Indianapolis district into four GOP seats and kneecap Democrat Frank Mrvan in the northwest? A primary firing squad, cheer-led by Sen. Jim Banks, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, and a meme-posting White House deputy chief of staff who thought Gladiator was a governing philosophy. As one political scientist politely translated it: Republican voters were taught that the only real sin was "not supporting Donald Trump"—constituents, the rule of law, and basic democratic representation can wait outside.
Hovering over all this is the Supreme Court’s latest gift to minority rule: a ruling that lets states gleefully smash apart majority-Black districts and other Democratic-leaning areas, just in time for Republicans to consider emergency map redraws before the midterms. So while Trump’s war with Iran is tanking his approval and spiking gas prices, the party’s backup plan is simple: if voters won’t keep you in power, just redraw the voters. Indiana’s message to any Republican thinking of growing a spine is clear: your principles won’t save you, but Trump’s retribution machine will absolutely find you.
#killing-democracy#fascism
venture capital populists discover the working class lives in their tax shelters
David Sacks explains populism from the rarefied vantage point of someone whose working-class struggle involves choosing between a fifth and sixth home on Billionaires' Row.
Terry Gross brings on George Packer to explain how Silicon Valley's self-proclaimed "disruptors" have discovered a new product line: authoritarian cosplay for fun and profit. David Sacks — early investor in basically every app on your phone and longtime resident of the "actually, I'm a libertarian" neighborhood — has rebranded himself as a "venture-capital populist" while sitting on a pile of equity and White House access. He now claims he's on the side of the working man, bravely defending America from the true elites: tech CEOs who don't clap hard enough when Elon tweets.
Once upon a time, these guys wrote checks to Democrats and talked about immigrants and gay rights at TED. Then the Biden administration had the unspeakable audacity to enforce antitrust laws, crack down on money laundering in crypto, and suggest that maybe AI shouldn't be a live beta test on the entire human species. Regulation showed up, and suddenly the "move fast and break things" crowd decided the thing they most wanted to break was democracy. MAGA offered them exactly what they wanted: deregulation, a war on "wokeness," and a president whose own crypto fortune has magically ballooned by at least $7.5 billion since 2024.
Sacks, now Trump's special adviser on AI and crypto and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, uses his White House podium time to praise Trump's "legal fairness" — which in this context means ending prosecutions of their industry while Trump rages about "lawfare" and his attempted assassination like he's the patron saint of persecuted billionaires. The new tech right gets regulatory immunity and policy tailored to their portfolios; Trump gets a pipeline of money, a veneer of "high IQ" validation, and a cadre of oligarchs willing to call this whole arrangement "populism" with a straight face. Everyone wins, except the public, the rule of law, and anyone not invited to Billionaires' Row.
#oligarchy#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump’s doge dropout wins ohio
Vivek Ramaswamy celebrates his win, presumably wondering how much of Ohio he can restructure like a distressed asset before voters notice the fine print.
Ohio Republicans have chosen their champion: biotech billionaire and briefly-employed Trump bureaucrat Vivek Ramaswamy, best known for co-running Trump and Elon Musk’s fantasy agency, the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) – a cost-cutting stunt that treated the federal government like a meme stock. After flaming out of the 2024 presidential primary and bailing on DOGE in a spat with the world’s richest midlife crisis, he’s now upgraded to trying to run an entire state.
His opponent, Dr Amy Acton, is the former state health director who tried to keep people alive during Covid, which in MAGA circles is apparently still an unforgivable sin. Republicans lovingly call her "Dr Lockdown" while Mike DeWine helpfully reminds everyone that he actually made the decisions, a bold move for a guy endorsing the Trump-endorsed billionaire who wants to "fix" Ohio by slashing property and income taxes and sprinkling some vague "technology" and "energy reforms" on top like policy glitter.
Ramaswamy is pitching himself as the parental-rights, low-tax savior who’ll deliver "world-class education" from inner cities to Appalachia, presumably funded by vibes, culture wars, and whatever’s left after the next round of billionaire-friendly cuts. Acton, who grew up poor, homeless, and abused, is running on boring things like the cost of living and not turning the state into a live-action Heritage Foundation white paper. The race is rated "lean Republican", which in 2026 translates to: the authoritarian-adjacent guy with a Trump stamp is favored, but might actually have to work for it.
Also on the ballot: Sherrod Brown is attempting a comeback for the remainder of JD Vance’s old Senate term, because this era isn’t done recycling characters yet. Between Vance’s ghost seat and Ramaswamy’s reboot, Ohio is basically a spin-off series of the Trump Show, now with more billionaires and fewer guardrails.
#killing-democracy#oligarchy#forever-grifting
state department cancels visas, renews commitment to petty authoritarianism
Rodrigo Chaves smiles onstage with his chosen successor Laura Fernández, secure in the knowledge that if Costa Rican institutions won’t fully bend to him, Marco Rubio’s State Department is happy to help apply pressure from the north.
The Trump-Rubio State Department has apparently decided that if you can’t jail the press at home, you can at least help your buddies harass them abroad. Washington quietly yanked tourist visas for most of the board of Costa Rica’s leading newspaper, La Nación — the same outlet that exposed sexual harassment allegations and sketchy campaign financing around Costa Rican president Rodrigo Chaves, a man who heard Trump call the press the "enemy" and said: say less.
Chaves has spent years smearing La Nación as "despicable press" and "political assassins" while weaponizing permits and regulations against their parent company. Now, after becoming a loyal Trump ally by taking in US-deported migrants, joining Trump’s "Shield of the Americas" spectacle, and shutting Costa Rica’s embassy in Havana, his critics are discovering that criticizing him also gets you punished by Washington. More than half the paper’s board just had their US visas revoked, while analysts warn that the US is actively "eroding the foundations" of free expression in Costa Rica. Exporting authoritarianism: it’s the one American product this administration still ships on time.
This isn’t a one-off glitch; it’s a feature. Since Marco Rubio’s victory lap in San José — where he praised Chaves for cutting China out of Costa Rica’s 5G network and vowed to "impose costs" on those who "undermine the interests of the people" — a growing list of Costa Rican opposition figures and critics have watched their visas disappear. That list includes former president and Nobel peace prize winner Óscar Arias, his brother, and even a supreme court justice. Now, with Chaves about to hand power to his handpicked successor Laura Fernández, local observers expect the campaign against opposition politicians, academics, and journalists to escalate. The State Department declined to comment, presumably because there’s no delicate way to say: we’re running a loyalty-based visa program for our favorite mini-autocrats now.
#killing-democracy#fascism#forever-grifting
trump’s commerce guy heads to the epstein memory-hole committee
America’s commerce secretary and a dead sex trafficker, enjoying island vibes and the full confidence of the Department of Justice’s delete key.
Donald Trump’s commerce secretary Howard Lutnick is heading to a closed-door interview with the House oversight committee to explain why his "I cut off Epstein in 2005" story somehow includes a family trip to Epstein’s private island in 2012 and business ties as late as 2014. Turns out when the Department of Justice briefly deleted, then quietly restored, an island photo of Lutnick and Epstein, it raised a few more questions than "who wore the white shorts better".
After weeks of pretending he was far too important to answer questions about his years of friendship and business with a serial sex offender, Lutnick finally agreed to talk only when Democrats threatened to subpoena him and, hilariously, Republicans on the committee didn’t immediately throw their bodies in front of the investigation. James Comer is now praising Lutnick’s "commitment to transparency" for agreeing to a transcribed, closed-door chat that couldn’t be less transparent if they held it in a SCIF at Mar-a-Lago.
Meanwhile, GOP member Nancy Mace is annoyed that these Epstein witness interviews keep getting scheduled when members are out of town, which is an interesting way of admitting Congress can’t even investigate elite sex-trafficking networks without tripping over its own vacation calendar. But sure, let’s all pretend this is a serious, functioning government and not a protection racket where Trump’s cabinet officials with Epstein island itineraries get gently "grilled" in private while everyone issues somber press releases about accountability.
#corruption#forever-grifting
turns out you can’t gaslight gas prices
Behold: the real approval rating tracker of the Trump administration, now at $5.29 a gallon and rising.
Donald Trump has finally found a metric he can’t lie into submission: the price on the gas pump. According to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, more than 8 in 10 Americans say high gas prices are wrecking their budgets, and a solid majority correctly trace the problem back to President Stable Genius, his Iran war, and his tariff cosplay. The same electorate that supposedly loved his “tough” foreign policy now mostly thinks the economy isn’t working for them, which is what happens when you treat the Strait of Hormuz like a content farm.
Trump’s overall approval is down to 37% with 59% disapproval, the worst numbers he’s ever managed in this particular poll — a truly impressive achievement for a man whose brand is nonstop underperformance. The collapse isn’t just among the usual suspects; he’s bleeding support from rural voters, white non-college voters, people making under $50,000, parents, Millennials, even white evangelicals who usually wouldn’t abandon him if he started charging admission to communion. Republicans are still mostly on board, but even there the approval gap has dropped 15 net points in about a year, suggesting that $5 gas has done what a coup attempt, 91 indictments, and a pandemic body count could not.
All of this has gifted Democrats a 10-point edge on the generic congressional ballot six months before the midterms, plus a lead on enthusiasm — a rare moment where the party that usually campaigns on “we’re not actively setting things on fire” gets to run on “also, we’d like you to afford groceries.” The war in Iran that Trump sold as a masterstroke of strength is now a political anchor, dragging his approval down faster than his lawyers’ hourly rates can go up. Turns out when your foreign policy doubles as an oil-price sabotage plan, voters eventually notice that the Dear Leader’s greatness does not, in fact, fill their gas tank.
So yes, the poll confirms that Americans are furious about prices, furious at Trump, and increasingly open to the radical idea that maybe electing a chronically indicted reality show landlord to run a war-and-tariff economy was not the genius move Fox News promised. The good news for Trump is that he still has time before November — to blame immigrants, windmills, and electric stoves for OPEC, while the rest of the country just wants to get to work without taking out a second mortgage.
#killing-democracy#imperialism
project freedom pauses, global economy continues screaming into a pillow
Map helpfully showing where President Trump and Marco Rubio decided to rerun the Iraq War DLC as a maritime choke-point minigame.
Trump has "paused" Project Freedom — the US operation to escort stranded ships through the Strait of Hormuz — for a "short period of time", allegedly by "mutual agreement" with Iran and at the request of Pakistan, which is now apparently our State Department. Iranian state media is calling it a victory, because when you launch Operation Epic Fury with Israel, help shut down 20% of the world’s oil flow, then quietly hit the pause button while keeping your own blockade in place, it does look a lot like you picked a fight with the global economy and lost the rematch to reality.
#killing-democracy#imperialism#national-security
