The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in immigration enforcement: newborns. The State Department is proposing that parents who want a passport for their US-born kids must now prove their own citizenship or immigration status, turning a routine errand into a mini inquisition to prop up Trump’s latest attack on birthright citizenship. Because when the Supreme Court tells you your first attempt to gut the 14th Amendment is unconstitutional, the obvious response is to try again with more paperwork and a different excuse.

This scheme is the implementation manual for Trump’s August 6 executive order allegedly targeting “birth tourism,” but the fine print says the quiet part out loud: the government will comb through parents’ status to decide whether their American-born child actually counts as American. Kids with a parent tied to a foreign government, accused of fraud, or labeled an “alien enemy” can find their citizenship quietly downgraded to "pending regime approval." The State Department insists this is about “protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship,” which is a poetic way of saying: we'll decide which babies get rights.

Under the current system, parents just prove they’re the parents and show ID. Under Trump’s new reality show, everyone has to cough up passports, birth certificates, I‑94s, green cards, and whatever else the bureaucracy demands so the government can run a loyalty check on your family before your kid gets to travel. Civil rights lawyers are already in court trying to stop this sequel to the administration’s first, already-struck-down birthright citizenship order. Trump keeps losing at the Supreme Court, but the policy goal is clear: if they can’t rewrite the Constitution outright, they’ll just make it impossible for the wrong families’ kids to use it.

Donald Trump, now an 80-year-old president with the emotional range of a Reddit troll, spent his weekend posting AI duck memes and complaining about a lake, while 23-year-old Olivia Rodrigo accidentally wandered into the role of Leader of the Free World by raising $20 million for women-focused nonprofits that his administration helped gut. The Trump team slashed funding for reproductive health and women’s legal groups, so a pop festival is now doing the basic governance work the federal government used to pretend to care about.

Meanwhile, US institutions are lining up to kiss the ring. Universities are defunding DEI, major media outlets are treating Trump like a temperamental monarch to protect their deals, and tech CEOs have happily curled up in bed with him, algorithmically tucking in authoritarianism every night. Against that backdrop, Rodrigo is openly calling out Roe’s overturning, telling the Trump administration not to use her music in its "racist, hateful propaganda" video demanding undocumented immigrants self-deport, and quietly showing solidarity with Gaza via her platform and even her wardrobe. You know things are going well when basic empathy is now a high-risk career move.

On the other side of the courage spectrum, Taylor Swift — the self-professed "right side of history" billionaire — has gone mostly ghost during Trump 2.0. Her songs were used in White House ragebait posts for months, then quietly removed with no public pushback from the world’s most powerful woman in sequins. No comment on Gaza, no comment on ICE, just a carefully curated silence while free speech, women’s rights, and civil liberties get put through a woodchipper. The message from Trump’s America is clear: the government will bully, defund, and intimidate; the oligarchs will cash in; and if you want anyone to stand up for the vulnerable, you’d better hope a 23-year-old pop star has enough backbone to cover the gap where institutions used to be.

The Trump White House took one look at the Postal Service — the agency that’s supposed to just deliver the mail — and said: what if this was in charge of deciding which Americans are real enough to vote? So Trump signed an executive order commanding USPS to help build a federal list of citizens and only send mail ballots to people on that list, which is definitely the kind of thing you do when you’re super chill about democracy and not at all obsessed with rigging the rules to stay in power.

A federal judge has already blocked this constitutional dumpster fire, but inside USPS, they kept coding away like a startup trying to ship a voting-rights-killing app before the SEC notices. According to an anonymous whistleblower, the ballot verification portal was built in a “rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” that started in earnest in June — for an election in the fall — on a system that should take 9–12 months. The design is so bad it rejects entire batches of 10,000 ballots if a single barcode doesn’t scan, which is a bold new standard: one smudge and everyone loses their vote.

Engineers reportedly described the project as a “s--- show” and warned the system might crash, which is exactly what you want from the federal infrastructure now being welded onto the core of elections. Even better, the whistleblower says USPS was ordered to keep building the system despite court orders blocking it, because why let “the Constitution” or “judges” interfere with a perfectly good scheme to jam up mail voting? Trump keeps screaming about imaginary voter fraud, then demands an untested, legally dubious federal voter database run by the post office. Strong “set the house on fire to prevent fire hazards” energy.

Dan Driscoll, the Army secretary Trump once hailed as a “disruptor and change agent,” has disrupted himself straight out of the building, handing in his resignation after months of reported friction with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth — a phrase that is somehow now a real thing and not a rejected Call of Duty DLC title. Driscoll was the No. 2 civilian at the Pentagon and yet another senior official deciding that serving under Hegseth is less "public service" and more "extended hostage situation".

The White House, doing its best North Korea cosplay, praised Driscoll for making the Army “more powerful than ever” and helping with Russia-Ukraine negotiations, as if this administration hasn’t spent years turning the Pentagon into a live‑action loyalty test. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has become a revolving door: the Army chief of staff Randy George was pushed out in April, the top commander in Europe and Africa, Gen Christopher Donahue, bailed in June, and Driscoll — a George ally — is now joining the exodus after hugging it out in the resignation receiving line.

Driscoll, an Iraq veteran and ex–JD Vance adviser turned tech investor, was supposed to modernize the Army, streamline contractor red tape, and help reshape drone warfare. Instead, his legacy is proving that even a Senate‑confirmed, 66–28 “safe pick” can’t survive long in a department run like a MAGA group chat with tanks. The message to the officer corps is clear: civilian control of the military now means Pete Hegseth gets to purge anyone who remembers how institutions are supposed to work.