The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Donald Trump held a special midterm convention — basically a live infomercial for a collapsing autocracy — where he tried to save Republican control of Congress by promising voters $5,000 checks and warning that electing Democrats would turn America into a "communist country". So yes, the sitting president is now doing a weird combo of vote buying and Red Scare dinner theater, and somehow the polls are still not impressed.

Despite years of aggressive gerrymandering and map-rigging, forecasters keep shifting key House and Senate races toward Democrats, including in North Carolina, Georgia, and even Kansas, where JD Vance has been dispatched like a panicked door-to-door salesman for a deeply unpopular product: Trumpism. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings are tunneling to new depths as his Iran war helps drive up gas prices and crushes farmers so badly that even Chuck Grassley has to publicly beg Dear Leader to stop lighting his own base on fire.

The nervous breakdown is now bipartisan — at least inside the GOP. House Republicans, suddenly aware that war is "terrible" and that voters hate broken promises, flipped just enough votes to pass a Democratic war powers resolution to end the Iran conflict. Outgoing Republican Nancy Mace helpfully summarized the vibes by predicting the midterms will be a "fucking bloodbath" for her own party, while other Republicans in tight races rush out ads demanding the war end "quickly" after previously voting to keep it going. Courage, but make it focus-grouped.

Democrats are whispering about a "blue wave" while veteran analyst Charlie Cook says Republicans should prepare for outcomes ranging from bad to "truly horrible" — a nice way of saying that Trump’s strategy of authoritarian posturing, cash-for-votes gimmicks, and endless war might not be the electoral masterstroke the cult promised. Turns out when you govern like a corrupt strongman and an incompetent arsonist at the same time, people eventually get tired of the smoke.

Congress is once again bravely confronting a complex, civilization-shaping technology by making sure senators can only use the lite demo version of it. According to internal guidance obtained by NPR, Senate staff are allowed to play with Microsoft Copilot Chat, Gemini Chat, and ChatGPT Enterprise — but are barred from the more advanced, agentic AI tools that are actually at the center of current safety debates. It’s like writing nuclear policy after being told you’re allowed to look at a glow stick.

The sergeant at arms, who oversees cybersecurity, has decided that tools capable of autonomously performing tasks — the ones that raise the real questions about control, data access, and emergent behavior — are too risky for the people allegedly in charge of regulating them. So staff get web chats that can’t touch internal drives, email, Teams, or other Senate resources, while the Fortune 500 happily deploys the good stuff on oceans of sensitive customer data. Tech lobbyists, meanwhile, are thrilled to watch lawmakers try to write guardrails for systems they’ve never actually used.

Experts note there are real security concerns, but also point out that Congress already hemorrhages information through old-school tools like Google Docs and email. The bigger problem is structural: an institution whose incentives reward delay and ignorance is now slow-walking access to the very tools it’s supposed to understand. AI agents are being "vetted for specific use cases" with no timeline, which is Washington-speak for "we’ll get back to you after the next data breach, deepfake election meltdown, or lobbying retreat at a Palm Beach resort." Regulation is coming, they swear — just as soon as they finish their supervised playtime with Clippy’s smarter cousin.

Donald Trump showed up at the UN general assembly and, as is tradition, threatened to “annihilate” Iran while casually workshopping US policy on Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, and AI like a guy spitballing ideas for his next reality show. This is the same president who has already abolished USAID, gutted the State Department, stacked the government with loyalists, toyed with quitting NATO, and literally captured the president of Venezuela. The old ‘rules-based international order’ has been replaced with the very stable genius model: whatever makes the global far right feel tingly inside.

Trump’s national security strategy, released in December 2025, helpfully formalized the vibes: Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” (straight from the Great Replacement fan forum), and the US will promote “patriotic European parties” — also known as ‘let’s export Steve Bannonism at scale’. While Trump builds an international coalition of ethnonationalists, Britain is stuck playing the world’s saddest game of diplomatic Twister. First Keir Starmer tried the flatter the autocrat approach — royal dinners, Princess of Wales photo ops, and a pharma trade deal that hands US drug companies up to £44.7bn from the NHS by 2030. Shockingly, grovelling did not buy protection.

Now new PM Andy Burnham flies into New York, gets called a “natural businessperson” by a man who bankrupted casinos, and has to figure out how to deal with a US that used to be ‘the first ally you call’ and is now the guy at the bar loudly planning regime change. Trump wants economic strangulation of Iran, ideological warfare in Europe, and Greenland ‘by any means necessary’. Burnham wants… a functioning relationship with the world’s largest loose cannon without fully signing onto the manifesto of the global far right. There are, as the Guardian politely puts it, “some really thorny issues coming up”. You don’t say.

The White House has apparently decided that if you can’t control the news, you just cancel it and start your own channel. Days after banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the building for the crime of journalism, the Trump administration rolled out a 24/7 YouTube channel called "Trump TV: The Essentials Station" — because nothing says "healthy democracy" like the president running his own state media feed from the West Wing.

The programming kicked off with Trump’s July 3 Mt. Rushmore speech, where he thoughtfully blamed "newcomers to our country" for a "resurgence of the communist menace" — subtle stuff, definitely not xenophobic demagoguery being repackaged as patriotic content. Meanwhile, the barred outlets have filed a federal lawsuit arguing that being locked out of the people’s house without notice or any process might, just might, violate the First and Fifth Amendments. Apparently the Constitution failed to include an exception for "hurting the president’s feelings."

Major networks — including Fox, which must have needed a shower after signing this one — issued a joint statement reminding the regime that the public has a "vital interest" in independent information about its government, not just 24/7 Dear Leader highlight reels. A coalition of outlets has also refused to use White House audio and video, leaving Trump TV to shout into its own echo chamber. Democrats like Mark Kelly and Gavin Newsom are calling it what it is: state-run media and "truly autocratic behavior from a failed President." The White House calls it putting the "biggest moments all in one place" — they just forgot to mention that place is somewhere between Budapest and Pyongyang on the media freedom index.

Leavenworth, Kansas used to be known for its historic prisons. Now, thanks to Trump’s deportation regime and private-prison darling CoreCivic, it’s the Midwest’s secret ICE hub — a former maximum-security hellhole reborn as a mass detention and deportation factory. The city tried to stop it, because some people in Kansas apparently still have functioning consciences, but then the Department of Justice showed up to accuse Leavenworth of "aggressive and unlawful" interference — translation: how dare you get between us and our for-profit gulag pipeline.

After spending over $800,000 on legal fees — about 6% of the city’s entire general fund — Leavenworth got the message: you can’t outspend a federal government that’s outsourced its soul to CoreCivic. So CoreCivic did what any respectable corporate partner in state repression does: it "bought its permit" with a $1.5 million "impact payment" and a $400,000-a-year allowance for the local government. Now the rebranded "Midwest Regional Reception Center" quietly sucks in immigrants from Minnesota, Chicago, Indiana, and beyond, shuttling them through a hub-and-spoke system designed to hide the scale of detention and speed them onto deportation flights before the public — or their lawyers — can catch up.

The administration’s dream of 100,000 detention beds stalled at a mere 66,000, as communities in Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas kept daring to object to being transformed into deportation depots. So Leavenworth, with its long carceral history and limited budget, became the path of least resistance: a city that didn’t want a detention center, couldn’t afford to fight one, and was ultimately bludgeoned and bribed into becoming a key node in Trump’s mass removal machine. The Midwest didn’t vote to be turned into an ICE logistics network; it just got out-litigated and out-lobbied by a government that treats immigrant lives as line items and local democracy as a minor administrative obstacle.