trump discovers colombia exists, immediately wants to bomb it
Gustavo Petro, seen here shortly before flying to Washington to discuss how many US bombs it takes to qualify as a ‘strategic partnership’.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro is heading to the White House to meet Donald Trump, the man who recently said a military operation in Colombia "sounds good" like he’s ordering the sampler platter at Applebee’s. This follows months of Trump-approved US strikes on "alleged" drug boats, ICE behaving so brutally Petro compared them to "Nazi brigades", and Washington treating half the hemisphere as its personal backyard empire.
Now that the US has seized Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and cleared the way for American oil firms, suddenly there’s a very serious conversation about "stabilising" the Venezuelan-Colombian border — which, shockingly, turns out to mean protecting corporate assets from ELN guerrillas. Petro has already deployed 30,000 Colombian troops to the border, while Trump threatens to expand US strikes to land targets across the region, because nothing says "partnership" like your "ally" reserving the right to bomb your territory.
Enter Rand Paul, who apparently moonlights as the Empire’s marriage counselor, brokering a "cordial" phone call that did a supposed 180 for both sides. Washington calls it diplomacy; everyone else calls it what it is: the US dangling security cooperation and intelligence sharing while Trump keeps the option of regional airstrikes on the table to safeguard oil flows and reenact the Monroe Doctrine in 4K. But sure, we’re told this will be a "constructive conversation" — just ignore the drones, the navy, and the part where Colombia’s sovereignty is treated as a negotiable line item on an ExxonMobil spreadsheet.
#imperialism#national-security
uae buys half of trump’s crypto clown car, gets ai chips in the gift bag
Donald Trump smiles next to Emirati officials, presumably discussing geopolitics, national security, and the totally unrelated half-billion-dollar stake in his family’s crypto side hustle.
Donald Trump’s second-term ethics experiment continues apace, as we learn that a senior Emirati royal – Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, national security adviser and chair of a $1.5 trillion wealth fund – quietly dropped $500 million into the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, a few days before inauguration. For that bargain price, Tahnoon’s people got a 49% stake, $187m went to Trump entities, $31m to cofounder/Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause got tossed down a storm drain behind Mar-a-Lago.
The White House insists this is all fine because Trump is "not involved" in his businesses, which are merely run by his sons, Donald Jr and Eric – those famously independent paragons of fiduciary distance. Ethics experts, who apparently still believe words mean things, are calling it "beyond unprecedented" and a "blatant, disgraceful conflict of interest". Meanwhile, Trump has been busy hosting cozy White House dinners for Tahnoon and Emirati delegations and posting about the "long-standing ties and bonds of friendship" on Truth Social, which is a very polite way of saying thank you for the half-billion and the stablecoin partnership.
Then comes the part where policy just happens to line up perfectly with the president’s balance sheet. In May, World Liberty announces that the UAE’s AI investment arm will use its Trump-linked USD1 stablecoin to shove $2bn into Binance. Two weeks later, the Trump administration overrules prior US national security concerns and lets the UAE import 500,000 Nvidia AI chips, despite fears they’ll end up helping China. The Guardian can’t prove a quid pro quo, but when a foreign government buys nearly half your crypto company and then gets a massive, strategically sensitive tech deal, it’s less "we may never know" and more we absolutely know what this looks like.
Republicans, who currently control Congress, are the only ones who can investigate this mess, so naturally they’re too busy screaming about college DEI statements to notice the president running a live demo of "how to sell foreign policy for fun and crypto." Elizabeth Warren is out here yelling "corruption, plain and simple" while Trump’s lawyers insist the Emoluments Clause doesn’t apply because these are just "mere appearances" of business deals he "has no involvement" in – other than owning the company, appointing the envoy, meeting the royal, hosting the dinners, and signing the policy. Democracy may be hanging by a thread, but at least the stablecoin has great liquidity.
#forever-grifting#corruption
arsonist urges firefighters to hurry up already
Trump, having discovered that shutdowns are unpopular outside his rally merch tent, bravely calls for an end to the crisis his own party keeps manufacturing.
Trump is now publicly urging Congress to pass a deal to end the partial government shutdown "without delay," which is a bold message from the guy whose entire political brand is breaking the machinery of government and then demanding applause when he stops hitting it with a hammer. After spending years normalizing shutdowns as a bargaining chip and turning federal workers into unpaid extras in his political hostage drama, he’s suddenly discovered urgency.
Speaker Mike Johnson is out doing his best "don’t worry, dad’s got this" routine, saying he’s confident the shutdown will end by Tuesday, while Republicans simultaneously wage yet another performative fight over DHS funding. So we get the usual GOP two-step: use national security as a prop, shut down the government over it, then claim Democrats are the ones endangering Americans. Strong family values, if your family is a crime syndicate.
Meanwhile, Democrats like Ro Khanna are saying they’re a firm no on reopening the government under yet another bad DHS deal, because apparently someone in the building remembers that governing is not supposed to mean "sign whatever the hostage-takers demand." Trump gets to posture as the dealmaker begging for resolution, Republicans get to keep breaking things, and millions of Americans get to learn, again, that their paychecks and basic services are just background scenery in the MAGA cinematic universe.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
trump cuts $2bn, tosses $100m band-aid, calls it recovery
Robert F Kennedy Jr announces $100m in grants while standing in the smoking crater where the Trump administration parked $2bn in SAMHSA cuts and a third of its staff.
Robert F Kennedy Jr showed up at SAMHSA’s "Prevention Day" to announce $100m in grants for a shiny new program with a tortured acronym (STREETS), aimed at helping people experiencing homelessness and addiction move from "sidewalks" to "self-sufficiency". Sounds nice, until you remember that this is being rolled out by the same Trump administration that just abruptly canceled $2bn in SAMHSA grants last month and has laid off about a third of the agency’s 900 employees. Nothing says "we care about continuity of care" like firing your staff and yanking core funding, then tossing out a pilot project like a consolation prize from a rigged carnival game.
The $2bn cut was so egregious that even this Congress noticed, produced a spine for 24 hours, and forced the administration to reinstate the money. Meanwhile, the workforce that actually runs these programs has been decimated, leaving providers in a state of uncertainty, fear, and logistical chaos—which is also a decent working title for the Trump governance model. Into that mess, the White House now inserts a complex, integrated-care homelessness initiative and pretends the underlying sabotage of the public health infrastructure never happened.
Kennedy, who’s candid about his own addiction history, gave a moving speech about how the current system "cycles" people from sidewalks to ERs to jails and shelters, and how nobody takes responsibility for "the whole person". What he did not mention is that the administration he works for has spent the last year taking a chainsaw to the very agency now tasked with fixing that cycle. But don’t worry: the Trump team has a plan — more faith-based partnerships. The administration will expand eligibility for addiction-related grants to religious organizations because, as Kennedy put it, addiction is "above all, a spiritual disease".
So after destabilizing secular, evidence-based infrastructure, the White House is now routing public money toward ideologically friendly, faith-based providers under the banner of "reconnecting people to community". It’s a neat trick: manufacture a crisis in mental health and addiction services, then step in with a smaller pot of money and a sermon, and call it the Great American Recovery. The streets stay the same; the grift just gets better branding.
#forever-grifting#healthcare
kushner launches genocide chic real estate startup: ‘new gaza’
Jared Kushner, freshly promoted from failed peace envoy to genocide-era real estate pitchman, explains to Davos billionaires how you, too, can turn a flattened enclave into a waterfront investment opportunity.
Jared Kushner has emerged from whatever hedge-fund-scented cave he lives in to unveil “New Gaza”, a Trump administration blueprint that turns a devastated, densely packed strip of land into a glossy brochure for lofts, offshore rigs, and “advanced industrial zones.” Two years of war, a UN commission finding that Israel committed genocide, $18 billion in destroyed infrastructure, and 2.2 million displaced Palestinians are recast as a ground-floor investment opportunity. Kushner assures Davos that they’ve already started “removing the rubble and doing some of the demolition,” which is a poetic way of saying: the bombs were phase one of the development plan.
This miracle vision of peace-through-property-flipping rests entirely on Trump’s ceasefire deal: Hamas must fully disarm, Israel withdraws in phases, and reconstruction only happens in areas where Palestinians are either disarmed into submission or already cleared out and under Israeli military control. The plan is almost impressively vague on who actually gets housing, how land deeds work, or what happens to families currently living in the buildings Kushner wants to bulldoze in central and western Gaza City. But it’s crystal clear on one thing: Israeli real estate investor Yakir Gabay helped craft the scheme and sits with Kushner on the White House–appointed Gaza Executive Board, which will report to Trump’s Orwellian Board of Peace. So Palestinians may not get property rights, but at least the investor class gets a board seat.
Critics, including people NPR spoke to in Gaza, say the plan effectively erases Gaza and replaces it with a privatized “destination” layered over the ruins of a massacred population. The administration’s answer to a genocide finding isn’t accountability or self-determination; it’s park-lined neighborhoods, floor-to-ceiling windows, and an offshore oil and gas rig slapped on top of a mass grave. Call it the Trump Doctrine: turn every catastrophe into a branding opportunity, outsource justice to developers, and let the people whose lives were destroyed fight over whatever’s left in the footnotes—assuming they were ever consulted at all.
#imperialism#forever-grifting
trump loses another war against the scary windmills
Artist’s impression of the grave national security threat: some wind turbines standing 30 miles offshore, menacing radar screens and the delicate ego of one very loud golf enthusiast.
The Trump administration’s crusade against offshore wind just took another legal faceplant. A federal judge cleared Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind project off New York to move forward, making it the fifth and final offshore wind farm to get court permission to ignore Trump’s December "national security" freeze. Apparently, when you arbitrarily halt multibillion‑dollar infrastructure because the ex-president thinks turbines are ugly, judges eventually notice.
Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that losing access to specialized installation vessels and delaying construction is "irreparable harm"—a concept that somehow eludes the people currently running the Interior Department, who are still hiding behind classified "radar interference" claims while refusing to explain anything in public. Ørsted, which has already sunk more than $7bn into Sunrise Wind, is resuming work immediately but keeping its lawsuit alive, because nothing says stable investment climate like having to sue the U.S. government every time Trump remembers he hates windmills.
Meanwhile, analysts warn that even with the construction freeze lifted, the project now faces a "very difficult and turbulent period" thanks to ongoing Trump obstruction. Sunrise Wind is already about 45% complete and is supposed to power nearly 600,000 homes starting as soon as October—assuming the administration doesn’t invent a new emergency about how offshore turbines might be sending secret love letters to Chinese weather balloons. American energy policy, once again, is being made at the intersection of personal vendetta and executive overreach.
#killing-democracy#anti-science
trump’s weaponization czar quietly shuffled to the pardon factory
Ed Martin, seen here auditioning for the role of Chief Revenge Officer, before being reassigned to the presidential absolution punch card desk.
The man Trump put in charge of the Justice Department’s "Weaponization Working Group" — a special little revenge squad tasked with going after prosecutors who dared investigate Trump and his buddies — is suddenly not in that job anymore, NBC reports. Ed Martin, a Jan. 6 apologist who openly promised to "name" and "shame" people the DOJ couldn’t actually charge with crimes, is apparently no longer leading the group. Which is awkward, because publicly smearing non-charged individuals is a blatant violation of long-standing DOJ norms, but an excellent fit for Trump’s justice-by-Truth-Social model.
Don’t worry, though: Martin hasn’t been exiled, he’s just been promoted to a different part of the loyalty rewards program. A DOJ spokesman says he "continues to do a great job" as pardon attorney — you know, the guy who helps decide which friends, allies, and useful political martyrs get official forgiveness from the same government they tried to overturn. Martin was already wearing both hats after Republicans balked at making him U.S. attorney for D.C., so Trump simply made him pardon attorney and director of the weaponization group by executive order, while handing the actual D.C. U.S. attorney job to former Fox host Jeanine Pirro. Because if you’re going to dismantle rule of law, you might as well let cable news alumni and activist cronies drive.
The working group’s mission reads like Trump’s personal enemies list: former Special Counsel Jack Smith, any federal cooperation with Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg over the hush money case, Jan. 6 prosecutions, and cases against anti-abortion activists. It’s a state-run grievance committee masquerading as oversight. Now the guy who wanted to run public shaming campaigns against people he couldn’t indict is parked in the pardon office, while no one will say who’s currently steering the weaponization ship. Fascism, but make it HR-compliant.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
trump tests new idea: democracy without counting people
Census worker’s bag from 2020, back when the government still pretended counting everyone was the goal and not just the people Team Trump finds demographically convenient.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new innovation in representative democracy: don’t actually test how to count people. The Census Bureau’s 2026 operational test for the 2030 census is being dramatically downsized from six states and a national sample to just two sites — Spartanburg, S.C., and Huntsville, Ala. Rural communities in western Texas and multiple tribal lands in Arizona and North Carolina have been quietly dropped, because why waste precious resources accurately counting people who aren’t big fans of authoritarian cosplay?
To really drive home the commitment to accuracy, the administration is also killing plans for Spanish- and Chinese-language online forms, leaving the test in English only. So the communities that are historically undercounted will now be scientifically under-tested as well. At the same time, the White House wants to experiment with replacing trained temporary census workers with already-overloaded USPS staff — because if there’s one institution Trump-world hasn’t finished kneecapping yet, it’s the Postal Service.
Meanwhile, the Census Bureau has refused to brief the members of Congress who are supposed to oversee it, and the administration has disbanded all of the bureau’s outside advisory committees, effectively pulling what one expert calls a “black-out shade” over 2030 planning. Translation: they’re messing with the machinery that decides political representation and hundreds of billions in federal funding, and they’d prefer you not watch while they do it. It’s less a census test and more a dry run for how far they can push voter dilution and structural minority rule before anyone manages to turn the lights back on.
#killing-democracy#racism#forever-grifting
trump turns disney world into 'america only' land
Mickey and Minnie posing cheerfully in front of Cinderella’s Castle, blissfully unaware that Trump’s tariff tantrums and surveillance fetish are scaring off half their guests.
Donald Trump’s America First magic trick continues: he’s managed to make Disney World less appealing to foreigners. Disney is warning investors that its US parks are taking a hit from falling international visitors, right as foreign travel to the US drops for the first time since 2020. Analysts are gently suggesting that maybe, just maybe, tourists don’t love a country that treats them like criminal suspects with a passport. Wild theory.
While Disney politely dodges questions about what’s driving the shift, the backdrop is doing all the talking: higher national park fees for foreigners, and a Trump administration plan to demand five years of social media history from visitors from dozens of countries, including the UK. A third of international travelers say they’d rather not go through a DHS vibes-check on their Instagram before riding Space Mountain. Meanwhile, Canadian visits cratered over 20% after Trump slapped them with tariffs, prompting a full-on boycott-the-US trend. Trump promised to make America great again; instead he’s turning it into the world’s least fun gated community, where the only thing really booming is resentment.
Disney’s parks are still squeezing out modest growth by leaning harder on US customers, because domestic demand for escapism is apparently bottomless when your president is a walking constitutional crisis. But the bigger picture is clear: the administration’s mix of trade-war cosplay, xenophobia, and surveillance creep is literally costing the country billions in tourism, all so Trump can play strongman at the border. The happiest place on earth now comes with a side of geopolitical blowback.
#trade-war#killing-democracy
fifa hands trump a peace prize for not bombing the stadium (yet)
Gianni Infantino and Arsène Wenger, calmly workshopping new ways to redefine 'peace' until it covers kidnapping presidents and threatening to seize Greenland.
Fifa president Gianni Infantino has finally found a line even Fifa’s corruption-hardened audience thinks is a bit much: he handed Donald Trump the inaugural Fifa peace prize, then went on TV to explain that, no really, the guy who had the Venezuelan president snatched and floated using military force to grab Greenland is actually a great humanitarian. According to Infantino, Trump was "instrumental" in saving "thousands of lives" in an Israel–Hamas ceasefire, so obviously the next step is a trophy from the organization that once made Qatar a feel‑good branding exercise.
After tossing out a lazy crack about British fans and arrests, Infantino mumbled an apology, then moved briskly back to the serious work of reputational laundering for a US administration facing unrest in cities like Minneapolis over its immigration crackdowns and openly musing about annexing chunks of the Arctic. Awarding a peace prize to the guy escalating global tensions is a bold choice; next up, Fifa’s ethics award to a hedge fund.
Because the farce needed a sequel, Infantino also floated that Fifa and Uefa "have to" look at letting Russia back into international football, explaining that banning the country after its invasion of Ukraine "has not achieved anything" except frustration. But don’t worry, he insists there’s no reason for anyone to boycott Trump’s World Cup, since businesses don’t boycott countries over human rights and democracy, so why should football? When your moral compass is pegged to corporate sponsorships and autocrats’ whims, Trump’s America looks like just another lucrative venue, not a warning sign.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
trump doj releases half the epstein files, calls it transparency
Todd Blanche explaining that releasing half the Epstein files with 10,000 redactions is actually what "full transparency" looks like now.
The Trump justice department has announced, with a straight face, that the Epstein investigation is now "over" after dumping 3 million pages of documents and declaring victory, while quietly sitting on another 3 million. Deputy attorney general Todd Blanche insists "we have nothing to hide"—they're just refusing to release half the records, blacking out thousands of names, and ignoring both a congressional subpoena and a federal law that explicitly told them to hand everything over. Totally normal behavior for an administration that keeps insisting the whole Epstein thing is a "Democrat hoax" while Trump’s own name shows up in the files.
Democrats like Jamie Raskin, Hakeem Jeffries, and Ro Khanna, plus Republican Thomas Massie (who apparently missed the memo that you’re not supposed to investigate rich predators in this country), are pointing out the obvious: this looks a lot less like transparency and a lot more like a state-sponsored damage control operation for the elite. Survivors are furious that their names were accidentally exposed while the powerful men they say abused them are still buried under redactions and missing documents. Lawyers for more than 200 victims are now in court asking DOJ to take down its document site because the department managed to produce what may be "the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in US history"—but sure, tell us more about how this is all about justice.
Meanwhile, Massie is being punished by his own party for the unforgivable sin of wanting "rich men perp walked in handcuffs"—a standard that, if ever actually applied, would turn half of Mar-a-Lago into a work-release program. As Republicans try to bounce him off the ballot for demanding Epstein transparency and Trump yells "hoax" into the void, the Trump administration is doing what it does best: weaponizing the federal government to protect friends, punish dissenters, and bury anything that might threaten the golden boys of America’s ruling class. Elite impunity remains undefeated; the rule of law, not so much.
#killing-democracy#lawlessness
president extremely mad that jokes still legal
Trevor Noah on stage at the Grammys, moments before the president of the United States decided the biggest threat to the republic was a joke about Epstein and an island he swears he never visited.
Donald Trump watched the Grammys, heard Trevor Noah make one Epstein joke, and immediately decided the real crime in America is defamation against Donald Trump. After Noah quipped that Trump needed Greenland since "Epstein's island is gone" and he needs a new place to hang with Bill Clinton, the president jumped onto Truth Social to call Noah a "poor, pathetic, talentless dope" and promised to sic his lawyers on him for "plenty$"—because nothing says "totally innocent and not defensive at all" like threatening to sue over an awards-show punchline.
Trump insisted he has "never been to Epstein Island" and, more importantly, had never even been accused of it "not even by the Fake News Media"—which is a very normal thing for a president to angrily clarify during the Grammys. Meanwhile, the crowd and artists spent the night denouncing his anti-immigrant policies, wearing anti-ICE pins, and reminding the country that "no one is illegal on stolen land", which probably didn’t help his mood as he live-posted through being publicly clowned.
This tantrum slots neatly into the broader second-term project: punishing comedians and media that dare to mock Dear Leader. Stephen Colbert’s show is being axed by CBS after he criticized the company for settling a $16m lawsuit with Trump (totally unrelated, they swear), Jimmy Kimmel got suspended by Disney and briefly had the president lobbying the FCC to yank ABC’s license, and Bari Weiss now oversees CBS’s rightward drift while Trump cheers the Grammys getting booted from the network as "garbage". The message is clear: criticize Trump and you might lose your show; joke about Trump and Epstein and he’ll threaten to sue you personally.
Noah, on his way out after six years hosting, responded to the outrage in real time: "It’s my last year! What are you gonna do about it?" The president has answered: deploy the lawyers, weaponize the chill, and keep testing how far a White House can go in treating mockery as a legal offense. Free speech is still technically alive; it’s just being sued, canceled, and harassed by the guy who swore an oath to protect it.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump threatens fed, gold investors discover gravity
Kevin Warsh, photographed moments before being informed his new job is "trying to keep the Fed independent while Trump live-tweets rate policy."
Global markets just had a minor heart attack because everyone has spent weeks assuming Donald Trump was about to stuff the Federal Reserve with a MAGA mascot who'd cut rates whenever he got bored on Truth Social. Gold and silver had been blasting through record highs as investors fled into "safe havens" from the terrifying prospect of Trump turning the Fed into his personal campaign ATM.
Then Trump announced he’d nominate Kevin Warsh, an actual central banker with real Fed experience and a reputation for not being a total pushover. Cue an 8% plunge in gold, a 7% drop in silver, and a bunch of traders suddenly realizing they might have slightly overpaid for their apocalypse bunker metals. One analyst politely translated this as "relief that a Trump cheerleader would not be installed" — Washington-speak for "we were all bracing for a loyalist who’d torch Fed independence on command."
Bitcoin, oil, copper, platinum — basically the entire speculative panic buffet — also slid as tensions with Iran might be easing and markets recalibrated from "Trump breaks Fed" to "Trump only threatens to break Fed this quarter." Deutsche Bank still thinks gold can hit $6,000 this year, which is a fun forecast that doubles as a confidence poll on whether Trump will keep menacing monetary policy until investors start stockpiling bullion again. The underlying message: as long as Trump is hovering over the Fed like a raccoon over a trash can, nobody believes institutional stability is more than a temporary condition.
#killing-democracy#money
trump nationalizes the arts, installs himself as head usher
Artist’s rendering of the Kennedy Center’s future: same building, 400% more gold letters and one very confused bust of JFK wondering how he ended up opening for Donald Trump.
Trump has decided that the Kennedy Center — the nation’s performing arts memorial to a murdered president — is "tired, broken, and dilapidated," which is bold talk from the guy whose brand is gold-plated bankruptcy. Having already stacked the Kennedy Center board with handpicked loyalists, made himself chair, stripped out Pride events, and jammed his name in front of John F. Kennedy’s on the façade, he’s now announcing a two-year shutdown for renovations, effective July 4. Because nothing screams "respect for institutions" like shuttering them on Independence Day.
The funding, Trump assures us, is "completed, and fully in place" — from where, he declines to say, and the White House is suddenly very shy. The Kennedy Center itself isn’t commenting either, possibly because they found out about their two-year closure the same way the rest of us did: a Truth Social post citing "Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants" — a phrase that reads like it was generated by an AI trained exclusively on Mar-a-Lago brunch conversations.
Meanwhile, the actual arts community has responded the only way it can: by fleeing. Since the board voted to staple Trump’s name over Kennedy’s, artists have been canceling in droves. Stephen Schwartz bailed on hosting a Washington National Opera gala, and the opera itself has now left the building after more than 50 years. One of the board’s ex officio members, Rep. Joyce Beatty, is suing the administration over the renaming, arguing that you can’t just rebrand a congressionally created memorial like it’s another failed Trump casino. But sure, let’s lock the whole place down for two years of mystery-financed "renovations" under a board that already turned a national cultural institution into a MAGA vanity project.
When it finally reopens for the promised "Grand Reopening," don’t be surprised if the nation’s performing arts center looks less like a living tribute to American culture and more like a very large, very tacky campaign rally venue with better acoustics.
#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
loser endorses man who called him a loser
John Sununu, seen here discovering that calling Trump a "loser" is fine as long as you later agree he’s your dear leader and job reference.
Donald Trump has bestowed his "Complete and Total Endorsement" on former senator John Sununu in the New Hampshire Senate race, because nothing says strong movement like a twice-impeached, insurrection-adjacent ex-president handpicking who’s allowed to run in a supposedly independent party primary. Sununu once wrote an op-ed calling Trump a "loser" while backing Nikki Haley, but in MAGA world, all sins are forgiven as long as you’re willing to carry the "America First" banner and pretend the cult leader is still the main character of American politics.
Democrat Chris Pappas responded by simply reposting Trump’s endorsement and saying he "approves this message," which is what you do when your opponent voluntarily brands himself as Trump’s franchise location in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Scott Brown — former Massachusetts senator, Trump ambassador, and now rejected applicant for the MAGA loyalty badge — bravely announced he will "keep working," which here means running against both Sununu and the reality that Trump owns the GOP like another failed casino.
The RNC dutifully declared the race a top priority, thrilled that the party’s Senate strategy still boils down to: wait for Trump to pick a favorite, call it grassroots energy, and hope voters don’t notice the entire process is being run like a licensing deal for the "America First" trademark. Representative democracy, but with brand management.
#killing-democracy#fascism
amazon spends $75m on melania fanfic, swears it’s not a bribe
Melania Trump on a giant screen, bathed in soft golden light, while Amazon executives in the front row frantically whisper, “Please don’t break us up, Mr. President.”
Amazon just blew a cool $75m on a Melania Trump documentary that critics describe as "dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing" and "expensive propaganda"—in other words, exactly the kind of content you make when you're trying to impress the guy who can make your antitrust problems disappear. The film cost $40m to make and another $35m to promote, only to open at $8m and get beaten at the box office by two horror movies, which is fitting since this is basically a horror movie about what happens when corporate America decides the First Lady is a line item in their lobbying budget.
The target audience? Older conservative women in deep-red, rural Republican counties, fed a glossy slurry of "patriotism, Christianity, and family" while Amazon, which just laid off 16,000 corporate workers, shovels millions into a feature-length campaign ad. Critics note the end credits praise Melania in such over-the-top fashion that "North Korea would blush"—because nothing says "healthy democracy" like leader-worship montages scored like a Marvel movie.
Director Brett Ratner, who'd mostly vanished from Hollywood under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, resurfaces here to assure everyone this definitely isn’t corruption, just a very, very expensive documentary where you’ll "see where the money went." On the same day the film opened, Ratner also appeared in newly released Justice Department "Epstein files" photos—because this administration can’t even roll out its vanity propaganda without accidentally cross-promoting the sex-crime cinematic universe. But sure, tell us again how this $75m love letter to Melania is just about "making a great movie for audiences" and totally not about currying favor with President Trump.
#forever-grifting#oligarchy
trump’s ice murders a mom, then fox news murders her character
Nothing says ‘land of the free’ like a memorial poster that has to clarify you were murdered by your own government.
Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mom of three, was shot and killed by ICE on 7 January. Within hours, bodycam footage torched the official fairy tale that agents fired in "self-defense"—so the Trump administration did what it does best: lie harder and smear the dead. Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem claimed Good had "weaponized" her car (she hadn’t), while Trump helpfully explained that "at a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement"—which is now apparently a capital offense.
On cue, the right-wing media outrage machine clocked in for its shift. Jesse Watters mocked Good as a queer "self-proclaimed poet" with pronouns in her bio, Laura Loomer announced that Good "deserved it" and wished her widow had been shot too, and JD Vance decided the real problem was that she was a "deranged leftist" whose own murder was "a tragedy of her own making". Because nothing says law and order like celebrating a state killing and then bullying the corpse.
When the public reacted with horror, the Justice Department—rather than investigate why ICE gunned down a woman in front of her home—opened a criminal investigation into her grieving widow, Becca Good, over vague ties to unnamed "activist groups." That was so grotesque that six federal prosecutors resigned in protest. In other words, the Trump administration has moved from "the police can kill you and face no consequences" to "the police can kill you, we’ll defame you on TV, and then we’ll try to criminalize your spouse for being sad about it." But sure, tell us again how this is the party of family values and freedom.
#lawlessness#killing-democracy
fbi raid, because trump still can't get over 2020
FBI agents hauling away boxes of Georgia ballots, bravely protecting America from the grave threat of Trump losing an election six years ago.
While ICE was busy turning Minneapolis into a campaign ad, another arm of Trump’s authoritarian fan fiction government was at work in Georgia. The FBI raided Fulton County’s central election facility and walked out with more than 700 boxes of 2020 ballots and election records, because nothing says "law and order" like using federal law enforcement to chase down your hurt feelings from four years ago. This is the first time in American history the FBI has seized ballots from a past election, but sure, tell us more about how it’s really about “election integrity.”
To really underline that this is about raw power, not security, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard showed up in person, because apparently the nation’s top intelligence official now moonlights as Trump’s personal ballot repo agent. The warrant vacuumed up everything: tabulator tapes, ballot images from the original count and recount, absentee and early voting records, voter rolls — the whole thing Trump has been obsessively lying about since he begged Brad Raffensperger to "find" him votes. Every claim he made about Georgia fraud has already been repeatedly debunked, so naturally the solution is to send in the FBI and pretend it’s 2020 forever.
Trump has openly said he regrets not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in 2020 because they weren’t "sophisticated" enough. Enter the FBI. Now he’s on Truth Social screaming "TRUMP WON BIG" and promising prosecutions, while his DOJ argues it has "sweeping power" to grab election records from states. In other words, the federal government will keep elections "free and fair" until they produce a result Trump likes. The Fulton County raid isn’t about the past; it’s a warning shot for 2026: cooperate with the narrative or watch your ballots disappear into a federal evidence locker.
State officials like Maine’s Shenna Bellows are basically reduced to saying, "I have the key and he’s not getting our ballots," which is where we are now: democracy defended by whoever still controls the padlock. The ICE invasion of Minneapolis shows how Trump plans to police people; the FBI raid in Georgia shows how he plans to police votes. Different agencies, same message: the law is whatever serves the president’s grievances today.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump's health department discovers the fun of live human experiments
RFK Jr and his vaccine advisory team bravely recreating the 1920s so we can finally settle the question: was polio really that bad, or just bad vibes and poor sanitation?
Robert F Kennedy Jr is running HHS and has decided the best way to prove he was always right about vaccines is to, checks notes, let measles and polio come back and see what happens. His handpicked chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), Kirk Milhoan, is now "reconsidering" all vaccine recommendations and musing on podcasts about how school vaccine requirements are basically "medical battery"—because nothing says "evidence-based public health" like turning a 60-year-old expert committee into a Facebook comments section.
As measles cases spike—416 in the first three weeks of 2026 after the worst year in three decades—Milhoan cheerfully describes it as a "real-world experience" to measure hospitalizations and deaths among unvaccinated kids. Public health experts call this "so dangerous as to approach criminality"; the Trump administration calls it "medical freedom". In other words, your child is now a data point in RFK Jr’s giant natural experiment in how fast we can reverse a century of progress.
To sell this, Milhoan pretends that making recommendations is "authoritarian" and that CDC "has to basically canonize" whatever ACIP says, which is not how any of this works. States actually set school vaccine rules through long, boring, evidence-based processes—at least they did, before Republicans and anti-vax crusaders started gleefully "decoupling" from federal guidance. So now we have a federal vaccines committee that thinks recommending vaccines is tyranny, state lawmakers chasing conspiracy clout, and a measles outbreak being treated as a teaching moment. But sure, tell us more about how masks were the real authoritarian overreach.
#anti-science#killing-democracy
trump celebrates freedom 250 by trying out a real blockade
Drivers in Havana wait in a fuel line so long it might qualify as a new form of US foreign policy: slow-motion regime change by empty gas tank.
Trump signed a shiny new executive order slapping extra tariffs on any country that dares sell oil to Cuba, because nothing says “protecting American citizens” like deliberately collapsing another country’s electricity, hospitals, food supply and transportation system. The White House tossed in some boilerplate about Cuba being a “safe haven” for Hezbollah and Hamas, and then, in a bold move, forgot to provide literally any proof. In other words: we’re doing regime change sanctions again, but this time with even less subtlety.
On the ground, Cubans are queuing for hours at gas stations that only take dollars most people don’t have, watching the clock tick down to the moment the island just runs out of fuel in a few weeks. Mexico backed off a planned oil shipment after US pressure, Venezuela’s oil is gone now that Washington helped boot Maduro, and other allies have gone quiet. Meanwhile, at the US embassy’s Freedom 250 party, chargé d’affaires Mike Hammer helpfully clarified the policy: Cubans have complained about “the blockade” for decades, but now there is going to be a real blockade. Because nothing says “land of the free” like bragging about economically strangling 11 million people.
Washington officials are reportedly shopping around for Cuban insiders “who would cut a deal,” just like they did before toppling Maduro, while floating the idea of a full naval blockade to Politico. A European diplomat points out they don’t even need warships—fear of US punishment is enough to stop tankers on its own. Cuba calls it a “brutal assault against a nation that doesn’t threaten the US,” releases videos of soldiers training for invasion, and prepares for more blackouts. Trump, for his part, says “Cuba will be failing pretty soon,” treating the slow-motion humanitarian disaster as a campaign talking point. But sure, tell us again how this is all about democracy and not 1960s-style imperial cosplay.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
