Thursday, August 20, 2026
ICE’s latest innovation: deportation roulette, now with a bonus mystery country round.
The US just shipped 20 people to Liberia, the first installment of a 1,200-person human offshoring package Donald Trump’s administration cut with Monrovia. Most of them aren’t even Liberian. They’re African, North American, South American, and Caribbean nationals being dumped in a country they often have never seen, because the White House needed a fresh workaround for that pesky asylum system.
Liberia’s justice minister says most of the deportees are guilty of “migration-related violations” and can seek asylum in Liberia if they like, which is a bit like being pushed off a lifeboat and told you’re free to swim to whichever shark looks friendliest. Immigration lawyers point out that this is the whole point: use third-country deportations as a legal escape hatch to quietly force asylum seekers back toward the countries they were fleeing, while pretending the US isn’t technically doing refoulement.
This Liberia deal is one of a series of often-secret agreements where the Trump administration has scattered thousands of people across nearly two dozen countries, about 10 in Africa alone, turning the global south into a dumping ground for America’s broken conscience. It’s not border policy, it’s a geopolitical version of “lost and found” where the US keeps losing people and hoping someone else will deal with the fallout.
The Pentagon’s vision of a free press: you’re free to print whatever we already wrote for you.
The Pentagon is reportedly considering firing Max Lederer, the long-serving publisher of Stars and Stripes, weeks before his planned retirement, right after the paper reported on miserable conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during Trump’s shiny new US‑Israel war on Iran. Lederer already said he was leaving because his idea of journalism doesn’t really line up with the Trump administration’s idea of "please clap for the Dear Leader’s aircraft carrier." Apparently that wasn’t submissive enough, so now they’re debating whether to shove him out the door just to make the point.
This isn’t some random blog; Stars and Stripes has been around since the civil war and exists to give service members independent news, not Pentagon fan fiction. Editor Erik Slavin has been openly saying his "foxhole" is editorial independence, which, under the second Trump administration, is roughly as welcome as a subpoena at Mar-a-Lago. The paper’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, was already fired in January after criticizing new restrictions and is now suing the Pentagon for retaliation, because of course she is.
Meanwhile, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell is proudly announcing the "modernization" of Stars and Stripes, which turns out to mean: dump Reuters and AP, ban anything that looks like journalism, and convert the outlet into a glossy catalog of "warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY"—so, CrossFit meets North Korean state TV. This follows the Trump Pentagon’s broader hobby of ejecting mainstream outlets from their workspaces, packing the press room with friendly propagandists, "unofficially" rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War, and trying to supervise reporters like unruly toddlers.
So yes, the military’s historic independent newspaper is being slowly throttled, its watchdogs fired, and its leadership threatened with premature termination for the crime of telling troops what’s actually happening on a carrier. Freedom of the press is doing great; it’s just being carefully adapted to serve a new generation of autocrats.
Horseshoe Bend, future site of the Department of Interior’s ‘Have You Tried Fracking It?’ pilot program.
The Trump administration has decided that the best use of a UNESCO world heritage site and sacred Indigenous landscape is as a backdrop for pumpjacks and uranium rigs. The Bureau of Land Management, now apparently rebranded as the Bureau of Liquidate Monuments, is proposing to erase a 10-mile drilling-free buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico so fossil fuel companies can cozy right up to thousand-year-old pueblos. UNESCO, whose whole job is "please don’t wreck humanity’s irreplaceable stuff", has politely pointed out that extractive projects are not compatible with world heritage status, but the White House seems far more interested in what Exxon thinks.
Public input, of course, was handled in the classic Trump-era style: an unusually short 14-day comment period for a plan that would open 336,000 acres next to Chaco to oil, gas, and uranium extraction — and still they got about 100,000 mostly hostile submissions. Tribal leaders, archaeologists, conservationists, and basically anyone who can read a history book say the move will cause "irreversible damage", which in Trump-world is less a warning than a mission statement. Former Interior secretary Deb Haaland, who created the buffer in 2023, called out Trump and BLM director Steve Pearce for trying to cash in on a sacred site; they responded by continuing to try to cash in on a sacred site.
This isn’t a one-off accident, it’s a franchise. The same administration has already leased land for drilling near Carlsbad Caverns, Republicans are pushing to lift the uranium mining ban near the Grand Canyon, and the Everglades is on UNESCO’s "in danger" list while the White House shouts "drill, baby, drill" over the sound of climate-fueled wildfires and record heat. Trump helpfully summarized the doctrine: America will be "rich again" because of the "liquid gold under our feet" — a handy way of saying that if there’s a choice between world heritage, Indigenous rights, and a livable climate, or one more quarter of fossil fuel profits, this government will gladly throw the planet and a few millennia of culture into the well.
Donald Trump playing fry cook for the cameras, moments before returning to his real job: deep-frying Medicaid and serving tax cuts to billionaires.
Trump once cosplayed as a McDonald’s worker in Pennsylvania for a campaign photo op, where he pretended to learn the fryer and drive-thru while serving up unsubstantiated claims about Kamala Harris’s summer job. He promised he’d "end inflation" and bring prices down; instead, we got the usual: soaring costs, shredded safety nets, and a "big, beautiful" bill that helps billionaires while kicking families off Medicaid. Performance art: A+. Governance: drive-thru window slammed in your face.
Manny Rutinel, an actual former fry cook who sold his own blood plasma to get through school, is now running for Congress in Colorado’s 8th to clean up the mess. He helped pass state tax credits that cut child poverty by nearly 40%, while Trump and incumbent Republican Gabe Evans are busy undermining the very programs that kept his family afloat when he was a kid. Rutinel holds in-person town halls and refuses corporate PAC money; Evans takes hundreds of thousands from corporate PACs, calls basic election legitimacy "not a yes-no question", and vanishes whenever workers strike or constituents want answers.
On affordability, the contrast is brutally simple: one guy who used to work the McDonald’s fryer is trying to keep a family of four from paying $2,000 a month for the same health plan that cost $500 two years ago, while the other guy is quietly cashing checks from the same interests driving up prices. Trump’s "working-class" brand turns out to be a costume he wore for ten minutes at a closed restaurant. The former fry cook? He’s the one actually trying to stop Trump’s "big, beautiful" health care cuts from closing hospitals in his own district.
Arturo Béjar arrives in court to explain that Meta knew kids were being harmed and chose vibes and ad revenue anyway — sort of like US foreign policy, but with more push notifications.
Israel has finally admitted that its soldiers opened fire on the car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six of her family members in Gaza back in January 2024 — the same incident they spent months insisting they had nothing to do with. Hind died after a three-hour phone call begging the Palestinian Red Crescent to rescue her, while the Israel Defense Forces claimed they simply weren’t in the area. Turns out, according to media investigations, those mysterious nearby tanks weren’t ghosts after all.
The IDF now says there will be a criminal investigation, which in Israeli military justice terms usually translates to: hold a press conference, issue a sternly worded PDF, and then quietly misplace the file. A UN report already described a “pervasive climate of impunity” in the occupied territories, and a UN commission has found that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — tens of thousands of civilians dead, whole neighborhoods erased, and Washington still signing the weapons checks like it’s Amazon Prime for artillery.
Meanwhile, back in the land of freedom and democracy cosplay, the Trump-era GOP and its successors spent years turning unconditional support for this into a patriotic sacrament: endless weapons, zero red lines, and anyone asking about dead kids was accused of hating America, Israel, and probably Christmas. The result: a five-year-old spends her last hours on the phone, begging to be saved from US-armed allies who later say, whoops, our bad, we’ll investigate ourselves and get back to you never.
Alan Dershowitz on Martha’s Vineyard, wondering how defending Trump, Epstein, and Weinstein *possibly* led to social consequences in a community that watches HBO.
Alan Dershowitz, once a semi-respected Harvard law professor and now the Paul Manafort of cable news green rooms, is still mad that Larry David won’t talk to him after he joined Trump’s impeachment defense team. Larry, whose job is literally to play an unlikable crank on TV, saw Dersh in a Vineyard grocery store and upgraded him from ‘old friend’ to ‘disgusting’ faster than you can say ‘unitary executive.’ When your social circle is basically Seinfeld and you still manage to be the moral low ground, that’s a skill.
Dershowitz, who has helpfully curated a client list that runs from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein to Harvey Weinstein, is wounded that the Hollywood comedy guy didn’t reach out when his son died, then runs to The Atlantic to workshop his feelings between complaints that Democrats are now the “most anti-Israel party in US history.” David briefly flirts with forgiveness, then calls the reporter back like a man haunted by his own conscience and clarifies: Dersh “made a deal with the devil. Literally. And I’d bet the devil hasn’t said a word to him since the impeachment.” Even Satan, it seems, has higher standards for legal counsel than Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just quietly drop-kicked Dershowitz’s $300m defamation tantrum against CNN, where he claimed they edited his impeachment comments to make it look like he had “lost his mind.” The justices, who love executive power these days, apparently drew the line at pretending Dersh still had a reputation left to defame. So we end up with the perfect Trump-era epilogue: a once-famous civil libertarian turned Fox News foghorn, ostracized on Martha’s Vineyard, whining that cancel culture took his friends away—when really, it was just that one tiny choice to help a would-be autocrat stay in office after trying to overthrow democracy.
Trump announces ‘economic D-Day’ on Iran and, accidentally, the rest of the global economy, live from the Oval Office’s new War Room: the Truth Social app.
Donald Trump has now moved from sanctioning Iran to basically sanction-curious about the entire planet. On Truth Social, he announced "TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences" for any country that dares do business with Tehran, promising "the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country!" — which is a bold claim from a guy who can’t explain how tariffs work. No details, no named targets, just all-caps threats and the diplomatic subtlety of a cinder block.
The expired 60-day ceasefire with Iran? No talks, no off-ramp, just Trump rolling straight from shooting war to financial carpet bombing under the branding genius of "Operation Economic Fury." Now he’s upgraded to "economic D-Day," because why not casually reference World War II while threatening to cut off airports, banks, and governments worldwide from the dollar system like he’s banning them from Mar-a-Lago.
He warned that "ANY country" offering any kind of "lifeline" to Iran — oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, ship registries, you name it — will face those mystical TREMENDOUS consequences. What consequences? Unclear. How will this affect allies, global markets, and the already spiraling conflict he and Israel kicked off in February? Also unclear. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently promised to isolate Iran "like the world has never seen before," and Trump seems to have heard that as: what if we just hold the whole global economy hostage and see who blinks first.
The BBC politely notes they’ve asked the White House and Treasury for comment, which is adorable, because the actual policy seems to be: Trump posts some caps-lock fan fiction about economic warfare, and the rest of the government scrambles to pretend there’s a coherent strategy behind it. Killing democracy is so passé; we’ve moved on to destabilizing the entire international financial system by social media post.
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Trump’s America: the federal government sues to protect your constitutional right to burn extra gas on lousy tires.
California quietly did a boring, practical thing: it decided that when people replace their tires, those tires should not be energy-wasting garbage from the Bush era. The California Energy Commission unanimously approved rules that say replacement tires have to be at least as efficient as the ones that come on new cars, which will cut emissions, save drivers close to $1 billion a year, and basically function as a “please don’t light the planet on fire quite so fast” policy.
Naturally, the right immediately melted down. Conservative outlets screamed "massive regulatory overreach" because tires that save you $179 in gas over their life might cost an extra $1.50–$6.50 up front. Industry groups howled, except Michelin, which awkwardly broke ranks by admitting the standards are technically feasible and align with what they’re already doing. Meanwhile, gas prices are sky-high thanks to the US-Israel war with Iran, making the savings even bigger—so of course the outrage machine is focused on defending the sacred right to buy cheap, inefficient rubber.
Hovering over all this is the Trump administration, which has been suing California cities to protect fossil fuels, trying to kill the state’s gas-car phaseout, and attacking its clean car rules in court. Federal climate policy under Trump is basically: if California finds a way to reduce emissions without needing federal permission, crush it; if it does need federal permission, deny it. So while California is out here regulating rolling resistance, the White House is busy regulating resistance to its fossil-fuel donors. One side is trying to keep cars from wasting energy, the other is trying to keep the government wasting time in court.
Mike Lindell, seen here preparing to hand-count every ballot until one of them finally tells him he’s special.
Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate and full-time election truther, has decided that losing Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary by 11 points is merely a suggestion. He’s now offering to personally bankroll a full hand recount and audit of every paper ballot in the state, because when you’ve torched tens of millions chasing imaginary fraud, what’s another $825,000 between you and reality?
Clutching a Minnesota statute like it’s the last MyPillow promo code on Earth, Lindell insists he has the "right" to a complete hand count and plans to use it "to the full extent of the law"—which, translated, means forcing election workers to spend weeks proving he lost by exactly the same humiliating margin, but slower. His campaign is alleging mysterious "irregularities" in electronic reporting data, also known as: the numbers where he did badly.
This latest tantrum comes on the heels of Lindell refusing to concede and just weeks after he quietly settled a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit from a voting tech company formerly known as Dominion, which he spent years accusing of masterminding a global election heist. Courts have repeatedly told him his claims are nonsense, but the Big Lie industrial complex has no off switch—just a bigger, more desperate crowdfunding page.
So Minnesota gets to be the next stage for the ongoing Republican experiment: what if we treat every inconvenient election result as provisional until the most conspiracy-addled guy in the room feels emotionally validated? The good news is he has to pay for this circus himself. The bad news is the price democracy keeps paying so these people can cosplay as victims is a lot higher than $825,000.
President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick demonstrate how to turn the Census Bureau from a statistical agency into an election denialist Etsy shop.
The Trump administration has discovered an exciting new use for the Census Bureau: turning a nonpartisan statistical agency into a content mill for election conspiracy fan fiction. An unsigned, seven-page "report" — helpfully assembled not by career Census experts but by a team that includes friends from the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute — magically finds over 24,000 alleged noncitizen voters in 2020, with Trump promising the number will "explode" once they finish running the rest of the data through the grievance blender.
Normally, the Census Bureau measures things like population and housing. Under Trump, it now measures how far you can stretch a commercial voter file and some mystery admin records before every election expert in the country starts laughing. The methodology is opaque, the authors are anonymous, and the people who supposedly believe in it refuse to answer questions — which, in this White House, now counts as "maximizing transparency." Meanwhile, actual studies show noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare, but that hasn't stopped Trump from using these junk numbers to demand sweeping new voting restrictions just in time for the midterms.
Election experts are openly calling the analysis "laughable," which is generous, because the punchline is that even these cooked numbers are too tiny to have changed the 2020 outcome. So the administration has managed to corrupt the Census, launder partisan propaganda through a federal agency, and still not find enough imaginary fraud to justify the coup they keep retroactively trying to validate. Strong work all around.
The U.S. Capitol, bravely standing guard over $40 trillion of "fiscally conservative" decisions and one very large donor-class receipt.
The US gross national debt has waddled past $40,000,000,000,000 for the first time, which is a lot of zeroes for a country that was told Trump’s tax cuts would "pay for themselves" like some kind of magic beanstalk. The Treasury’s books now show $40.047 trillion in total public debt outstanding, a number large enough to fund basic healthcare in a sane country or, in our case, a few more gold-plated fighter jets and a permanent tax holiday for people who own yachts that have their own yachts.
Decades of bipartisan fiscal cowardice are in the mix, but Trump’s deficit-bomb tax cuts are right there in the write‑up: a giant, gift‑wrapped transfer to corporations and the ultra‑rich that blew an already leaky budget straight through the hull. Social safety-net programs get framed as the scary cost driver, while nobody mentions that we chose to give away trillions in revenue so Jared’s friends could buy a third vacation home and then lecture everyone about "fiscal responsibility". Expect Republicans to use this milestone as an excuse to demand cuts to food assistance and Social Security, while carefully leaving untouched the one thing that actually helped create this mess: their donors’ tax bills.
So yes, the US has a $40 trillion tab. The good news is we know exactly who ordered the most expensive items on the menu. The bad news is they’ve already left the restaurant, holding a lifetime supply of stock buybacks and carried interest, while the rest of us get to argue over which public service to starve so the check doesn’t bounce.
Natalie Harp, faithfully lugging the portable printer that turns Trump’s whims into official reality, one freshly inked delusion at a time.
Natalie Harp, former OAN host and professional Trump resurrection story, has gone from RNC cancer testimonial to executive assistant to the president — a job that normally means scheduling meetings, not curating reality for an aspiring autocrat. Officially, she’s the person who handles logistics and paperwork. Unofficially, she’s the “human printer,” constantly glued to Trump’s side with a portable printer like some cursed Office Depot angel, deciding which headlines and social posts get beamed directly into the presidential brainstem.
This isn’t just quirky office culture. Whoever controls the paper flow to a president who barely reads and only trusts praise has massive power over what he believes is happening in the world. Harp also ghostwrites his Truth Social posts, typing in his voice while he watches Kamala Harris speeches and rants, which means some of those unhinged presidential statements aren’t just from Trump’s id — they’re co-produced fan fiction. Reporters and insiders describe her as his “gatekeeper,” “comfort blanket,” and, per Maggie Haberman, basically his emotional support staffer on secret national-security flights, because apparently the nuclear codes travel with a binky now.
When Senator Jon Ossoff’s questions put a spotlight on her influence, the White House responded not with transparency, but with a toddler-grade meltdown on X, calling CNN’s Kristen Holmes a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment” and predicting her own children will be “sickened” by her journalism. So the public learns that a devoted election denier — who reportedly once wrote to Trump, “You are all that matters to me” — is filtering his information, scripting his posts, and flying on sensitive trips, and the official response is to threaten reporters’ future family therapy bills. Totally normal, healthy democracy stuff.
Trump, mid-sentence, explaining how his next hangout with a nuclear-armed dictator will definitely work this time, unlike all the other times he said that.
Trump has announced he’ll meet with Kim Jong Un this year, because nothing reassures the world like a nuclear standoff being treated as a recurring reality show reunion special. Actual progress on denuclearization? Verification regimes? Coordination with allies? Don’t be ridiculous — there’s only room in this script for vibes and photo ops.
Instead of a coherent North Korea strategy built by diplomats, we get Trump freelancing nuclear policy like it’s a side hustle, turning decades of painstaking multilateral work into his personal autograph tour for dictators. Each time he dangles another summit, Kim gets more legitimacy on the world stage while giving up precisely nothing, and U.S. institutions get pushed further into the role of background extras in the Trump-Kim bromance saga.
So the president once again promises that only he can solve it, by staring lovingly across a table at an unelected tyrant and declaring it a "great relationship." The State Department can write memos; Trump just wants another chance to play nuclear cosplay with his favorite hereditary despot.
Trump proudly showcasing the newest White House amenity: valet service for his ego via helicopter.
Trump took a break from dismantling democracy to give America a hard-hat free, totally unpermitted-seeming guided tour of his latest renovation project: a shiny new helipad carved into the White House South Lawn. Officially, it’s being "expedited" for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit, because nothing says serious diplomatic engagement like making sure Marine One has better parking.
This helipad is framed as part of Trump’s grand "overhaul" of the White House, which increasingly resembles a Mar-a-Lago annex with nuclear codes. Sure, it's presented as a functional security upgrade for high-level visits, but the real winner here is the guy who now gets a taxpayer-maintained helipad in his front yard. The presidency may be temporary, but the concrete poured for his convenience? That’s the kind of legacy Trump actually cares about.
So yes, the South Lawn is becoming a bespoke landing pad for presidential ego, wrapped in the language of diplomacy and logistics. Infrastructure week is dead; long live Helipad Week.
The Washington Monument contemplates its reflection and wonders which part of the Mall will be accidentally criminalized next.
The National Park Service quietly told the Trump administration on June 11 that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was peeling because of a botched renovation job and overspray, not some Antifa canoeist with a vendetta against concrete. Then, a week later, Trump loudly accused people of "destroying" the pool and his Justice Department charged former Olympian David Hearn with destruction of property anyway. When the facts and the president’s tantrum collided, guess which one the prosecutors initially went with.
Court filings now show the engineer’s email clearly said the peeling top layer was "very thin and will not impact the strength of the liner" and was basically worthless overspray. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Spence has helpfully admitted that this information, once it finally surfaced, would "sabotage" the government’s ability to prove Hearn did any real damage — which is a polite way of saying the case was nonsense from day one. Jeanine Pirro’s U.S. Attorney’s Office eventually dropped the charges after documents confirmed the real culprit was contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings, not an Olympian on a sightseeing trip.
Naturally, Trump responded by attacking Pirro for "choking" and insisting the Reflecting Pool was vandalized, because reality is optional but retribution is mandatory. Prosecutors now want the case dismissed without prejudice so they can theoretically refile it later, while Hearn’s lawyers are asking the court to bar any future attempt at this "politically motivated prosecution." The Trump team managed to turn a maintenance screwup into a federal criminal saga, proving once again that under this administration, the only thing thinner than the pool’s liner is the evidentiary basis for their rage-fueled indictments.
Elon’s bold new global health strategy: fire the firefighters, sell the fire truck, and tweet at the flames.
Global health experts spent months warning that the Ebola outbreak in the DRC could outstrip the 2014–16 crisis. Now it has: more than 2,300 dead, the deadliest Ebola outbreak the country has ever seen, driven by a rare Bundibugyo strain with no effective vaccine, conflict zones, and attacks on treatment centers fueled by misinformation. So naturally, this was the perfect moment for Washington to take a chainsaw to the very institutions designed to stop this kind of thing.
Back in 2014, Barack Obama went to the UN, rallied the world, and let USAID do what it actually exists to do: train local health workers, do contact tracing, and build vaccination programs. Under Trump, we got the cosplay version: Elon Musk, self-appointed efficiency messiah and de facto head of the now-defunct "Department of Government Efficiency", was handed the controls and promptly dismantled USAID. The result in the DRC: weaker health systems, gutted surveillance, and the loss of hard-won institutional expertise – all because the world’s richest guys and their pet president decided competence was for losers.
Just to make sure the disaster had proper sequel energy, the US then withdrew from the World Health Organization, one of its biggest donors walking away in the middle of a century defined by pandemics. Europe, never one to miss a chance to copy the worst ideas available, also treated aid as optional charity instead of basic global survival infrastructure, with the UK planning to slash its aid budget even further. After a decade of solemn speeches about "global health security" and "lessons from Covid", governments chose the lesson "cut everything and hope nothing bad happens".
The DRC is now living with the bill for that ideological experiment. International aid wasn’t just some feel-good vanity project; it was the thin, boring, bureaucratic line between a containable outbreak and a spiraling catastrophe. The Trump-Musk efficiency project proved one thing with brutal clarity: when you blow up the fire department to save money, the fire doesn’t become more efficient – it just spreads.
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s trade strategy: a giant AI-powered mallet repeatedly missing a very large, very obvious Chinese factory.
The Trump administration has discovered a stunning new insight: if you stop importing “Chinese” products from China but keep importing the same Chinese components laundered through Vietnam and Mexico, you have not, in fact, defeated China. This revelation has Peter Navarro in a full tantrum over “Chinese motors on Vietnamese recliners,” while the White House waves around a report titled The Great Transhipment Scam like it just uncovered Watergate instead of the world’s most predictable loophole in its own tariff circus.
So what’s the big, bold policy fix? Not tackling the actually important stuff like China’s deliberately weak yuan or global trade imbalances. No, the White House is rolling out an AI border “detective” that “never sleeps, never tires, and never forgets” – unlike the American manufacturing jobs that have been missing since Trump first waddled into office and stubbornly refuse to reappear. This digital hall monitor will scan bills of lading, play global Whac-A-Mole with supply chains, and do precisely nothing to change the fact that US manufacturing employment is right where it was ten years and two and a half administrations ago.
Meanwhile, despite years of tariffs and chest-beating, US imports are higher than in 2024, China’s exports keep growing, and Beijing’s currency games continue to undercut everyone from American workers to developing countries trying to build an industrial base. The US actually has tools to pressure China on its undervalued yuan and structural surplus, but that would require coherent strategy, international coordination, and telling voters the truth instead of handing them another shiny tech gimmick and declaring victory on Fox News. Much easier to blame sneaky recliners from Vietnam and pretend the AI cop at the border is going to fix a decades-long global imbalance.
DHS officials refreshing X to like their own post about deporting Ethiopians, confident that nothing says ‘rule of law’ like shipping people back into an active conflict zone.
The Trump administration just unlocked a new achievement in its never-ending war on immigrants: a federal judge has cleared the way for it to strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 5,000 Ethiopians and start targeting them for deportation. DHS immediately logged on to X to announce that people whose TPS it just cancelled are now "ILLEGALLY" in the country and have two options: "LEAVE IMMEDIATELY or be DEPORTED"—a helpful reminder that the cruelty is not a byproduct, it's the brand.
The ruling from US District Judge Brian Murphy lifts the last remaining block on Trump's quest to wipe out TPS designations from more than a dozen countries. DHS general counsel James Percival hopped online to gloat that "All TPS terminations are in effect!" because nothing says "public servant" like publicly high-fiving yourself for making thousands of people deportable. The judge did leave one tiny door open: plaintiffs can keep arguing that the cancellations were driven by racial or national-origin animus, which, if proven, would be unconstitutional. So yes, the court is basically saying: you might win later on racism grounds, but in the meantime, pack your bags.
All of this is happening while Ethiopia is still a mess of armed conflict, drone strikes, and simmering civil war in Tigray, Oromia, and Amhara. Biden's administration originally granted TPS in 2022 because the country was literally in crisis; Trump’s DHS—under Secretary Kristi Noem, whose expertise in East African security surely rivals her knowledge of campaign backdrops—decided in December that conditions are now "safe" enough to start deporting people back. Advocacy groups say thousands of lives are at risk; the administration says: mission accomplished. Welcome to US immigration policy, where the only protected status is being white, rich, and holding a golf club membership.
James Comey’s radicalized seashells, now apparently the greatest threat to presidential security since the Mueller report.
The Trump justice department has now reached the "reading death threats in beach décor" stage of authoritarian decline. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of North Carolina filed court papers insisting there is "no serious dispute" that James Comey’s Instagram photo of seashells arranged as "8647" could reasonably be read as "Kill President Trump". Apparently, under the new legal standard, if a number might upset Donald Trump, it’s a felony.
Comey’s lawyers, clinging stubbornly to concepts like "dictionaries" and "common sense", point out that "86" means "get rid of" in the "you’re cut off at the bar" sense, not "form a seashell-based assassination squad". They argue the post is protected speech and nowhere near a "true threat", and also accuse the government of "vindictive and selective prosecution" designed to carry out Trump’s years-long vendetta against the guy who dared investigate Russian interference. Authoritarian bonus round: they say this isn’t a good-faith application of the law at all, just the president using the criminal process as his personal therapy dog.
This is Trump’s second swing at Comey in a year: the first indictment, for allegedly lying to Congress, collapsed after a judge ruled the prosecutor was unlawfully appointed. So now we’re on to Case #2: The Seashell Menace. The DOJ’s position is that a retired FBI director posting vacation content is secretly issuing coded kill orders to his followers, while the president’s rage at a former official somehow keeps materializing as federal charges. Rule of law is doing great; it’s just being replaced by whatever Trump thinks "86" means on any particular golf day.
Donald Trump, thoughtfully considering whether to deposit his latest presidential profits in a bank, a golf course, or another doomed crypto scheme.
Donald Trump has apparently decided that if you’re going to loot American democracy, you might as well do it at scale. He pulled in a casual $2.2bn in 2025 alone, with at least $1.4bn coming from his crypto clown car while roughly a million of his fans ate nearly $4bn in losses. Truly, a movement built on sacrifice — just not his. Meanwhile, wealthy foreigners keep pouring money into Trump hotels and golf resorts, because who needs an emoluments clause when you’ve got a loyalty pledge and a golf cart?
Congress, having discovered that oversight is hard and fundraising is fun, has mostly decided to treat this as a spectator sport. Trump’s Justice Department even tried to help him kneecap the IRS and secure immunity from past audits that could save the family about $100m, until an Obama-appointed judge rudely remembered what laws are. Over at Truth Social, the president is now selling early access to his market-moving posts for $100,000 a pop, a sort of presidential insider-trading subscription box that media groups say is blatantly unconstitutional — so naturally it’s moving full steam ahead.
Two-thirds of Americans tell pollsters they know he puts personal gain over the country, his approval has cratered to 33%, and historians are already calling this the most openly corrupt administration in US history. Yet Trump calmly explains that the only real check on his power is his own morality, which is like saying the only thing restraining a raccoon in a dumpster is its sense of decorum. Until voters hand Democrats enough seats to do basic oversight, the toddler remains elbow-deep in the presidential cookie jar, and everyone else just gets to watch their democracy get itemized as a business expense.
