The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Democrats are now literally wargaming how to keep elections functioning because the sitting president won’t stop screaming that democracy is fake unless he wins. In a DC conference room, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Raphael Warnock, Elissa Slotkin and friends sat through tabletop scenarios featuring AI deepfakes, death threats to election workers, and armed guys in tactical cosplay showing up at polling places – also known as "the Republican base, but with better filters."

While experts walk senators through synthetic videos and firebombed drop boxes, Donald Trump is out on primetime TV insisting China stole voter data for 220 million Americans, that 2020 was rigged against him, and that only his "Save America Act" (banning mail-in ballots nationwide and jacking up ID requirements) can fix it. Intelligence reports? His own government already said China didn’t interfere, but Trump’s solution is to threaten broadcast licenses of networks that won’t air his rant live and to push federal oversight of state voter rolls via OMB and potential FCC punishment for inconvenient coverage. Totally normal stuff from a guy who swears the real threat is "election fraud."

Protect Democracy, Democracy Forward, Marc Elias, Eric Holder and others are basically running a democracy disaster drill: what if Trump withholds funds from states that won’t hand over voter rolls, what if DHS and the National Guard suddenly materialize at polling places, what if vigilantes stake out ballot boxes and start doxxing license plates? The cheery takeaway: this is an "all-hands-on-deck" moment. Translation: the Constitution is still technically there, but the president is busy treating it like a suggestion while his allies test how far they can push fascism before someone in Congress finds a spine.

The Minnesota GOP is reportedly torn over whether to hand its gubernatorial nomination to Mike Lindell, the "MyPillow" CEO who turned mass-election-denial into a full-time performance art piece. He's running on a straight Trump platform, because of course the party that tried to overturn an election is now workshopping a sequel: January 6, But Make It Scandinavian.

Some Republicans are worried that Lindell’s very public devotion to Trump might hurt them in November, which is adorable, since that same devotion has been the party’s entire personality for six years. The internal debate boils down to this: do they want a normal extremist who quietly undermines democracy, or the guy who live-streams it from a hotel ballroom next to a stack of discount pillows?

Either way, Minnesota voters are being asked to choose between ordinary conservative dysfunction and a man who spent the last election cycle trying to prove that Excel spreadsheets are a deep-state psyop. The Trump movement keeps insisting it’s not a cult, yet here we are, watching a major party seriously consider putting the MyPillow guy in charge of a state government. Sweet dreams, democracy.

Donald Trump’s justice department has once again discovered a bold new legal theory: the First Amendment is adorable, but only for people who praise Dear Leader. Federal prosecutor Will Rosenzweig was two weeks away from trying a multimillion‑dollar Medicare fraud case when conservative influencer and part‑time informant Natalie Winters dug up his long‑dead personal blog – a mix of travel, sports, and the unforgivable crime of criticizing Donald Trump – and blasted it out on social media, helpfully tagging senior DOJ officials like she was filing a customer service complaint with an authoritarian regime.

Less than three hours later, while Rosenzweig was out of town with his family observing Rosh Hashanah, he got an email personally signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi firing him. No hearing, no process, just straight from "Happy New Year" to "you’re fired for thoughtcrime." This, mind you, was a prosecutor who had returned millions to taxpayers fighting healthcare fraud and was doing so well they’d just promised him a special parking spot. In Trumpworld, that apparently translates to: excellent at your job, but insufficiently worshipful of the guy who lost the popular vote twice.

The lawsuit makes the subtext explicit: the firing was part of a broader purge of prosecutors who worked on Trump-related investigations or were insufficiently loyal to the MAGA line. Rosenzweig’s complaint torches the idea that Americans must muzzle themselves forever on the off chance they might one day work for the government, noting that conditioning public employment on political loyalty is more Havana and Caracas than Hamilton and Madison. The current DOJ, of course, declined to comment, presumably because "we fired him for hurting the president’s feelings" doesn’t test well in front of a federal judge.

So here we are: a Justice Department that treats old blog posts as disqualifying heresy, while actual Medicare fraudsters were about to go on trial thanks to the guy they just canned. Rule of law under Trump means the law rules you, and Trump rules the law. Everyone else can choose: keep your job, or keep your opinions.