Todd Blanche, freshly promoted from Trump’s personal legal valet to attorney general, prepares to use an 1873 anti-smut law to decide what modern Americans can get in the mail.
Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer and currently his most ambitious yes-man, just squeaked into the attorney general job in a 3am Senate vote like a burglar who knows the security cameras are on. Blanche is an anti-abortion zealot who sees the Justice Department not as a law enforcement agency but as a crusader’s staff weapon, and he’s already promising Christian-right activists that he’ll make Dobbs "permanent" in every state. Translation: red-state bans aren’t enough; he wants to shut down blue states’ protections, too, because freedom is only "states’ rights" when the state wants to control your uterus.
Blanche’s master plan involves digging up the 1873 Comstock Act — a Victorian anti-smut law designed for a world where "telehealth" meant leeches — and using it to ban mailing abortion pills nationwide. That would kneecap access to mifepristone and even misoprostol, forcing people back toward dangerous methods the pill had basically made obsolete. He’s also floating lawsuits to kill blue-state "shield laws" that protect doctors who prescribe abortion pills across state lines, effectively letting Texas and Louisiana project their theocracy into New York and Washington. States’ rights, but make it imperial.
Not satisfied with turning the DOJ into an anti-abortion SWAT team, Blanche is also "working hand in hand" with health agencies to pressure the FDA into rolling back its own science-based rules. The same pill that’s been proven safe for decades is suddenly under "review" because the misogynist right needs a pretext to yank it from the market; Louisiana is already suing to shut down telehealth access, and Blanche’s DOJ is perfectly positioned to switch sides the minute Trump decides Fox News won’t yell at him for it. So while Trump pretends to be "moderate" on abortion for suburban voters, his attorney general is quietly building a legal death star aimed at abortion rights, state sovereignty, and the idea that the mail should deliver medication instead of Christian nationalism.
A kindergarten classroom in 2026, now featuring crayons, glue sticks, and a completely unnecessary risk of measles thanks to presidential YouTube science.
The week after Donald Trump claimed vaccines come in doses "the size of a soda bottle" and insisted that MMR shots might be "quite lethal" when given together, the CDC quietly dropped new data showing kindergarten vaccination rates slipping and non-medical exemptions hitting a record high. The agency tried the "nothing to see here" approach in a three-sentence statement, while actual doctors looked at the numbers and saw 280,000 unvaccinated kindergarteners and thought: ah yes, the prequel to an outbreak.
Meanwhile, pediatricians and local health officials are busting their asses to keep kids vaccinated while the federal government, led by an HHS secretary described as an anti-vaccine activist and science denialist, sprays confusion like a firehose. Trump staged a White House anti-vax pageant with Robert F Kennedy Jr and FDA nominee Heidi Overton, then signed an executive order to cut the routine childhood vaccine schedule from 17 diseases to 11 and force the MMR into three separate shots — a scientifically pointless, logistically impossible move that would require drugmakers to resurrect products they stopped making decades ago. Perfect policy if your goal is fewer vaccinated kids and more preventable disease.
All of this is happening while the US is having its worst measles year since 1991, with hundreds of cases in Utah and South Carolina and low-vax "pockets" around the country ready to light up like a measles advent calendar. State and local officials are slowly clawing their numbers up — Cleveland dragged kindergarten coverage from 68% to 76% — only to watch the White House undercut them on national TV. The Constitution may leave health to the states, but Trump is doing everything he can from the bully pulpit and the executive order desk to turn a debunked Andrew Wakefield fever dream into federal messaging. Public health experts call it dangerous; the virus calls it a jobs program.
The Secretary of Transportation bravely inspects America’s infrastructure: his marriage, his kids’ personal brands, and the sponsor logos on the RV.
For America’s 250th birthday, the Trump administration has gifted the nation a six-part Department of Transportation reality series where Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy takes his nine kids, his Fox News host wife Rachel Campos-Duffy, and his ego on a taxpayer-adjacent pilgrimage across America. Officially, it’s meant to “celebrate and share America’s story.” In practice, it’s a three-hour sizzle reel for Meet the Duffys that just happens to live on a government YouTube channel and open with Donald Trump giving the family his presidential blessing and a level of insight roughly on par with a talking GPS.
The show’s big twist isn’t the plot (there isn’t one) but the financing: the government swears no taxpayer money was spent, which is technically comforting until you notice the sponsors include Boeing, Toyota, and Waymo — you know, companies regulated by the Department of Transportation. That fun little arrangement was enough for CREW to file an ethics complaint, because turning your regulatory portfolio into a branded content package is slightly different from cutting a ribbon at a highway rest stop. Naturally, the "Great American Road Trip" spends less time on, say, Arizona, and more time on the Duffys renewing their wedding vows on camera and offering relationship advice, all while shoehorning in a glowing visit to Waymo that delicately omits the part where its cars block ambulances at mass shootings.
Every episode promises history and geography but delivers family lore and soft-focus prayer circles, with the Liberty Bell and the Grand Canyon reduced to background extras in the Sean & Rachel Cinematic Universe. When Duffy tries to draw a deep metaphor about buffalo herds and family unity, a tour guide has to gently inform him they’re actually bison, which doubles as a neat summary of the entire project: glossy, self-important, and wrong on the facts, but absolutely certain it deserves a platform. The end result is a government-commissioned reality pilot masquerading as patriotic programming — a perfect Trump-era blend of state media, influencer culture, and regulatory capture, all wrapped in a family road trip no one asked for.
Behold: the bold new housing strategy — fewer tents, more jail cells, and a billionaire think tank to call it “reform.”
The Cicero Institute, founded by billionaire venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, looked at record homelessness and decided the real problem was that it wasn’t illegal enough. After a couple of failed tries, their team flew back into Indiana and finally helped push through a bill to make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street. Catholic leaders warned it would brutalize the poor, sheriffs said it would jam up the jails, and a Republican state senator literally said, "We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that." The Trump-era GOP considered this useful feedback and did the opposite.
Trump then issued an executive order on homelessness that so perfectly matched Cicero’s wishlist it might as well have shipped with a "drafted by your friendly neighborhood billionaire" watermark. Twenty-one states have taken up Cicero-style camping bans or related bills, 16 have passed them, and Cicero analysts now roam statehouses explaining that the threat of arrest will magically nudge people into treatment. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is working with the group to rewire federal homelessness aid away from things that actually house people and toward forced treatment and criminalization. The safety net isn’t being reformed; it’s being repurposed into a carceral vending machine for the comfort of donors who don’t like seeing tents.
Trump at the podium, bravely standing up to the terrifying threat of a woman holding a microphone and a fact-check.
The BBC helpfully conducts a field study on a rare and delicate creature: the American president who detonates any time a woman with a press badge asks him to explain himself. Trump, who never met a mirror he didn’t love or a follow-up question he didn’t treat as treason, has been busy shutting down reporters for the crime of doing journalism in his general direction.
Tom Bateman walks through the greatest hits: queries about his failures, lies, and basic facts that cause Trump to pivot from "leader of the free world" to "guy yelling at customer service" in under three seconds. The pattern is simple: ask about accountability, corruption, or reality, and you get public insults, personal attacks, and an attempted character assassination broadcast live. The message is clear: a free press is fine, as long as it behaves like his campaign rally crowd.
It’s not just thin skin; it’s a strategy. By targeting reporters—especially female journalists—with sneering put-downs whenever they press him, Trump turns normal scrutiny into a spectacle and signals to his base that facts are optional and questioners are enemies. Call it media relations by way of authoritarian cosplay: why answer hard questions when you can just try to destroy the person asking them on camera?
Trump stares at a world map like it’s a mall directory and declares the food court his new territory.
Donald Trump, never one to let international law get in the way of a good war fantasy, told a South Carolina crowd that he now considers the Strait of Hormuz to be "an American territory." The context: the U.S. is enforcing a months-long military blockade on Iran’s shipping and ports, the war is dragging into its sixth month with no peace deal, and the president has apparently decided that if you park enough warships somewhere, it just becomes yours. Somewhere, a fifth-grader’s geography teacher is weeping into a copy of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Campaigning for Darline Graham, who is trying to inherit Lindsey Graham’s Senate seat and his appetite for forever war, Trump bragged that "no ships get through unless we want them to" and said he "likes the idea" of declaring the waterway U.S. territory. He then did what every responsible commander-in-chief does on a Friday night: joked about "go[ing] back and bomb[ing] Iran a little bit more" and followed it up with a dramatic reading of "The Snake" to smear immigrants. Blockading a vital global oil artery, fantasizing about annexation, casually joking about more bombing, and then using a racist poem as a closer – it’s U.S. foreign policy as open-mic night.
Centcom helpfully chimed in on social media to note that U.S. forces have already redirected 68 commercial vessels to comply with the blockade, while Trump posted a map labeling the Strait as "new U.S. territory" like a bored child drawing extra states on the globe. Iran’s deputy foreign minister dismissed the whole thing as "delusions," which is polite diplomat-speak for "this guy is trying to LARP as the British Empire." As one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil flows through a waterway the president thinks he can claim by tweet, the administration continues its experiment in what if gunboat diplomacy, but dumber.
Darline Graham greets supporters while silently counting South Carolina’s 50 million imaginary residents, all of whom definitely want Trump to handle national security for her.
South Carolina Republicans are being asked to send Darline Graham to the Senate for six years on the strength of two powerful qualifications: she’s Lindsey Graham’s sister and Donald Trump says she’ll do what he tells her. Graham, freshly appointed after her brother’s sudden death, wandered into a debate and helpfully announced she’s “not that informed on national security” and that there are “50 million people in South Carolina” (the Census, cruelly biased, insists it’s about 5.6 million).
Trump’s sales pitch to rally-goers was refreshingly honest for once: she’s “very smart,” he insists, because she understands that national security is his thing and she’ll basically just do what “the military wants, and really what the president wants.” Why have a senator with their own knowledge or judgment when you can have a pre‑endorsed rubber stamp? Some MAGA superfans, to their credit, briefly notice that sending someone to the world’s most powerful deliberative body who openly admits she doesn’t know what she’s doing might be a problem. Others shrug and say they don’t know her platform, but if Trump likes her, that’s enough. Representative democracy has evolved into a very efficient system: skip the issues, just check whether Dear Leader hit the like button.
Strategists are baffled why Trump is burning political capital in a safe red seat, but the answer is right there: this isn’t about South Carolina, it’s about building a Senate caucus of personal loyalists whose job is to back Trump first, last, and always. Policy knowledge is optional; fealty is mandatory. The ballot might say “United States Senate,” but the job description being read to the base is “Trump’s proxy vote from South Carolina.”
Karoline Leavitt, fresh off government payroll, warms up for her new role translating billionaire money into patriotic-sounding press releases.
Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job as White House press secretary to spend more time with her family — and by "family," of course, we mean Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc. After a grueling 18 months of explaining why the president’s latest rant was actually 12‑dimensional chess, she’s headed right back to the Trump-aligned cash machine that pretends to be an "independent" political committee.
She’ll be one of Trump’s "top outside advisors" now, which is a very poetic way of saying: doing campaign work with unlimited money while everyone keeps a straight face about coordination rules. The same person who just finished speaking for the president from the White House podium will now speak for the super PAC backing the same president’s candidates, but don’t worry, the FEC’s comatose watchdogs are totally on it.
Leavitt assures reporters they’ll still see her around Washington and even back on Air Force One for the GOP’s midterm convention — just not as a government employee anymore, which is convenient when you’re shuttling between taxpayer-funded optics and billionaire-funded influence. America’s campaign finance system wasn’t so much broken as repurposed, and this is what it looks like when you stop even pretending there’s a line between the government and the donors who own it.
Donald Trump, seen here mentally calculating how many tanks it takes to fix a poll number, contemplates suing math for defamation.
Donald Trump has decided that the real threat to American security isn’t crime, war, or climate disaster. It’s… regression analysis. After the Center for American Progress released a report showing his $1.7bn National Guard deployments in DC, Memphis, and LA didn’t actually reduce crime, Trump’s personal lawyer fired off a letter threatening a $5bn defamation lawsuit unless they retract it. Because if the numbers don’t show your glorious leadership is working, clearly the problem is the numbers, not the leadership.
CAP’s crime: pointing out that cities without Trump’s cosplay-martial-law stunt saw crime fall at basically the same rate, and that violent crime started dropping before he even waddled back into office in 2025. CAP’s response was to politely say "lol no" in legalese, calling the claim "absurd" and reminding the president that the First Amendment still exists, at least on paper. They even note that their report is about crime stats and federal actions, not Trump personally — which is adorable, since his lawyer’s letter helpfully lists all the things readers might conclude: that Trump "knowingly deceived the American people," "manipulated crime statistics," "abused military and executive authority," and "staged a sham law enforcement operation." As confessions go, it’s pretty efficient.
So the sitting president is swinging a $5bn legal bat at a think tank for publishing inconvenient facts, while pretending this is about his "reputation" and not about silencing critics who point out that his National Guard photo-op spree was an expensive failure. The administration burns $1.7bn on a data-free security theater production, and when someone runs the numbers, Trump’s response is: sue the calculator.
Ed Martin, freshly retired from dismantling Jan. 6 prosecutions and polishing the pardon pen, heads out of DOJ to protect “free and fair elections” the way a fox protects a henhouse.
Ed Martin, a "Stop the Steal" organizer who somehow speed-ran the career ladder from Jan. 6 defendants’ attorney to interim U.S. attorney for D.C. to pardon attorney, is leaving the Trump Justice Department so he can go "fight Legal Battles" in the upcoming elections. Trump announced the move on Truth Social, praising Martin as the "Director of the Weaponization Working Group" — which is a fun way of saying "guy we put in charge of harassing prosecutors who investigated me and my buddies."
Martin, who had no prior prosecutorial experience, was dropped into the D.C. U.S. attorney job in 2025, where he promptly oversaw the firing and demotion of Jan. 6 prosecutors and opened an "investigation" into how the Capitol riot cases were handled. Even Senate Republicans like Thom Tillis tapped out on that one, forcing Trump to withdraw Martin’s nomination for the permanent post because apparently even this was too on-the-nose for them.
Undeterred, Trump just shuffled Martin sideways into DOJ leadership as associate deputy attorney general, pardon attorney, and head of the so-called weaponization group tasked with turning the Justice Department into a revenge machine against Trump’s past investigators. That gig didn’t last either — NBC reported earlier this year that he was stripped of that role — but he kept the pardon pen, because of course he did. Now he’s off to "ensure Free, Fair, and Honest Elections" by leading election-related legal fights, which is like putting the arsonist in charge of the fire code and calling it public safety.
Attorney General Todd Blanche hopped on X to call Martin "a patriot who loves this nation" and cheer on his "future successes," which nicely sums up the Trump-era pipeline: organize efforts to overturn an election, sabotage prosecutions of the people who stormed the Capitol, help run a politicized purge inside DOJ, then graduate to overseeing election "legal battles" from the outside. The revolving door between sabotaging justice and sabotaging democracy is working beautifully.
Treasury wires $725 million to the UN so the US can keep its voting rights while continuing to pretend the bill was never really due.
The Trump administration has graciously decided to toss the United Nations a partial life raft: a $725m transfer toward the more than $4bn the UN says it’s owed. Think of it as the diplomatic equivalent of skipping rent for years, then dropping a couple hundred bucks on the landlord the week before eviction court. Aid experts say it will help the UN pay salaries for a while, which is a polite way of saying the global body can now afford to keep the lights on while Washington continues its cosplay as a deadbeat superpower.
This splashy almost-payment arrives just in time for Trump’s upcoming speech to the UN General Assembly, where he can brag about how he “saved” the institution his administration has spent years starving. Under Article 19 of the UN Charter, the US is flirting with losing its voting rights if it keeps stiffing the bill, so this looks less like generosity and more like a last-minute minimum payment to keep the credit card from being declined at the podium. Meanwhile, the administration has already slashed UN funding, refused mandatory peacekeeping payments, and pulled out of dozens of international agencies. It’s not diplomacy; it’s protection money to an institution they’re still trying to burn down from the inside.
DHS officials bravely hunting for 16,000 phantom voters, finding 185 real people, and deciding the original number is still good enough for a presidential primetime panic special.
The Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security proudly announced it had uncovered as many as 16,000 non-citizens on Nevada’s voter rolls. After someone apparently located a calculator and a conscience, DHS quietly admitted they’d actually confirmed … 185. Not 16,000. Not 1,600. One-eight-five. The rest? A "ceiling" of potential non-citizens based on a black-box process they refused to fully explain, then admitted wasn’t manually reviewed because, as one official put it, “we don’t just have, you know, like a thousand people to drop from the sky.” They do, however, have a president willing to go on primetime TV and cite 278,000 supposed non-citizen registrations across four states as if it were gospel.
Nevada election officials, who apparently still believe in things like "evidence" and "not stripping citizens of their rights for fun", kept asking DHS how they came up with the list. DHS admitted the 15,903 number was “preliminary,” hadn’t had a full manual review, and then handed the state another 6,218 "high confidence" names, i.e., people they hadn’t actually vetted but thought might be a problem and hey, ballots are going out soon, maybe start purging? Meanwhile, the president hyped a Census document with more junk claims about non-citizen voting, because why let math or reality interfere with a good voter-fraud scare story.
The farce gets better: the DHS team includes Heather Honey, an election denier best known for misleading research on voter records, now helpfully embedded in the federal government to do it with a .gov email address. DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin had already threatened election officials with fines and prison time if they didn’t play along with the purge crusade, but when Nevada’s elections director pressed them on whether any state officials had been referred for criminal investigation, DHS admitted they had made no referrals and also had no authority to charge them. So the criminal penalty talk was pure intimidation theater – fascist vibes, zero legal substance.
By the end, DHS officials are praising Nevada’s data quality while refusing to "name and shame" other states, prompting Nevada’s deputy secretary of state to dryly note that DHS saves the shaming for press releases. The whole episode is a case study in how to manufacture a voter-fraud crisis: start with bloated, unverified numbers, threaten election officials with prison, blast the lie nationwide, then quietly concede under questioning that, after actual review, the apocalyptic fraud wave is a puddle. The damage to public trust, of course, is the point.
Workers race to finish the nation’s most expensive anxiety ballroom as the Supreme Court makes sure the party never has to stop for something trivial like the law or historic preservation.
The Supreme Court briefly looked up from dismantling democracy to handle a truly urgent matter: making sure Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom doesn’t suffer the indignity of a construction pause. Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary stay blocking lower court rulings, letting the above-ground portion of Trump’s $400 million, "privately funded" monument to tackiness keep rising while the full court pretends to think about it.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation had the gall to suggest the president might not have the authority to bolt a mega-ballroom onto a national landmark and also that it looks hideous, which, given Trump’s design track record, is the safest bet in Washington. A district judge had split the baby — underground security and medical facilities could continue, but the glitzy ballroom-on-top had to wait. The D.C. Circuit agreed, setting a deadline for work to stop unless the Supreme Court stepped in to rescue the chandeliers.
Instead, Roberts waved the bulldozers through. The administration bragged in court filings that the project is already 65% done, with a 250-person crew working 20 hours a day, seven days a week — not for infrastructure, not for climate, not for housing, but for a presidential party bunker that just happens to massively upgrade Trump’s future events venue. Authoritarian chic meets Mar-a-Lago aesthetics, now with an "extensive underground component" for "security" and "medical facilities" — because nothing says stable democracy like turning the People’s House into a fortified event space for one man’s ego.
Natalie Harp, seen here preparing the latest glossy, full-color edition of Reality For Trump Only™.
The Guardian finally answers the question nobody asked but everybody should've: who is Natalie Harp, the so‑called "human printer" glued to Donald Trump like a wireless HP OfficeJet with no off switch? After Sen. Jon Ossoff name‑dropped her in a viral speech, Harp has gone from background loyalist to public symbol of the Trump industrial propaganda complex. Her specialty: churning out flattering content and curated "news" for Dear Leader, ensuring the only reality that reaches Trump is one where he’s a misunderstood genius and everyone else is a hater.
This isn’t just some quirky staffing choice; it’s how you build a soft-focus dictatorship. Instead of briefing books from policy experts, Trump gets personalized ego packets lovingly assembled by a devoted aide whose entire job is to reinforce his alternate universe. When your president needs a full-time human to filter out reality, you don’t have an administration, you have a cult management team. The spotlight on Harp isn’t about her résumé so much as what her existence says about the regime: authoritarian cosplay edging steadily into the real thing, one printed page of sycophancy at a time.
JD Vance explains that US foreign policy is now a subscription service where allies get insulted in private and billed in tariffs in public.
At a closed-door fundraiser in Southampton, Vice President JD Vance reportedly treated US–Canada trade talks like open-mic night, mocking Prime Minister Mark Carney for trying to "out-tough" Donald Trump while the administration dangles 50% tariffs over Canada like a mob protection racket. According to the leaked audio, Vance calls Carney a "very sweet guy" who supposedly "climbed down" on a lot of issues, which is a bold critique coming from the guy whose job description is now apparently "Trump hype man with Air Force Two access."
All this stand-up comedy is happening as Trump threatens to hammer a major ally with massive tariffs, then graciously offers a three-day pause like he's extending a Black Friday sale on economic damage. The White House insists the punishment is for Canada's "discriminatory" alcohol rules, while Canadian provinces responded by cutting US booze imports by about 81% and discovering that, shockingly, they also know how to ferment things.
Back in Canada, Manitoba premier Wab Kinew says Carney was just one notch above "begging" provinces to put US alcohol back on shelves, while still urging Canadians to keep boycotting US products anyway. Kinew also helpfully notes that Trump is weak, America is weaker, and you can't get a good deal with a bad person — which is exactly what you want to hear from a longtime ally about the American president while his VP is across the border giggling to donors about how Canada "climbed down." Diplomacy, but make it podcast beef.
DOJ election monitors bravely defend America from the menace of people quietly filling out ballots.
The Trump justice department, led on civil rights by Harmeet Dhillon because irony is now a performance art, is bragging it will send 1,000 election monitors to the 2026 midterms. On paper, that’s a normal DOJ function. In practice, it’s being announced by an administration whose leader still denies losing in 2020, tried to federalize elections by executive order, and has been suing states to get private voter data. So, just your standard "we swear this is about protecting democracy" from the guy still rage-posting that democracy cheated.
Voting rights experts are unimpressed, mostly because this DOJ can’t keep staff in the civil rights division, much less coordinate a 1,000-person cosplay operation. Past cycles had hundreds of monitors too, and so far these ones have mostly produced thrilling footage of government lawyers standing around with clipboards, being politely ignored by voters and moved outside the 100-foot line by local officials. States like Minnesota are now monitoring the monitors after a Trump-era immigration crackdown there killed people and deported thousands, which really builds trust when the feds show up to “help” with voting.
The department claims it wants the “largest monitoring effort in its history,” while state and local officials quietly restrict them to the sidewalk and refuse to let them inside polling places. Trump, meanwhile, keeps musing about the federal government taking over elections like they’re another failing casino he can run into the ground. So yes, the experts say this particular stunt probably won’t successfully sabotage the midterms. It’s just one more step in the ongoing experiment where the arsonist keeps insisting he’s only there to inspect the fire alarms.
Nothing says ‘strong borders’ like deporting lifelong Angelenos until Mexico City has better LA vibes than Los Angeles.
The Trump administration’s dream of "making America great again" continues to mean making America smaller by ejecting anyone who doesn’t fit the Fox News casting call. Since Trump’s second inauguration in 2025, roughly 145,500 Mexican nationals have been deported, including people who’ve spent decades in the US and barely remember the country printed on their birth certificates. Mexico City’s Tabacalera neighborhood has quietly turned into "Little LA" – a patchwork of palm trees, Spanglish, and people who grew up in California but got one-way tickets to a place they last saw from a car seat.
Christopher Gil Ortíz is the new normal: snatched by ICE on his way to work in Los Angeles, handcuffed, detained, and dumped back in Mexico more than 30 years after he left as a child, his wife and two kids left behind in Trump’s America. He describes relief when he was finally detained – because living under constant threat by an administration obsessed with deportation raids is somehow worse than being exiled to a country you barely know. That’s the policy achievement here: turning the land of opportunity into a place where arrest feels like mercy.
In Mexico City, organizations like New Comienzos are doing the basic humanitarian work the US government can’t be bothered with: helping deportees get IDs, find jobs, and figure out how to exist in a place that’s technically their "home" but practically a foreign country. Meanwhile, Tabacalera’s anti-Trump graffiti does the constitutional oversight Congress refuses to. Trump gets to brag about "tough" immigration numbers on TV; the actual humans he expelled are busy building a shadow Los Angeles in exile, because the original decided it preferred fear to neighbors.
Adam Silver, Josh Kushner, and Bob Iger plotting the next phase of late‑stage capitalism while pretending to watch tennis.
The Los Angeles Lakers are reportedly being flipped yet again, this time to former Disney emperor Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner, better known as Jared’s slightly less radioactive brother. Price tag: $12.5bn, or roughly the GDP of a small country, for the privilege of turning a once-beloved community franchise into a glorified hedge fund with courtside seats. Jerry Buss bought the team for $16m in 1979 and held it for decades; the new model is: buy, squeeze, flip, repeat.
This would be the second sale in 14 months, because nothing says "long-term vision" like treating an NBA dynasty the way Trump treats casinos and marriages. Private equity guys Mark Walter and Todd Boehly grabbed majority control at a $10bn valuation in 2025 and are now apparently cashing out with a tidy $2.5bn bump, having discovered that the real sport isn’t basketball, it’s asset inflation. The Buss family is busy reenacting Succession in purple and gold, squabbling over whether to unload their remaining 17.8% stake while everyone involved gives stirring speeches about "tradition" and "community" that would make a used-car salesman blush.
The NBA’s old model of "patient capital" is being replaced by the Kushner-Iger special: extractive finance wrapped in Hollywood branding. Teams are now traded like blocks of over-leveraged condos, and the league’s board of governors will almost certainly approve it, because why stop oligarchy at owning politics when it can own your childhood team too? The Trump extended universe may be a constitutional dumpster fire, but it’s doing gangbusters in the "quietly buying the culture" department. Showtime is dead; welcome to EBITDA Time.
Admiral Nimitz pins the Navy Cross on Doris “Dorie” Miller, back when the Navy honored actual courage instead of debating whether to name warships after guys who wage war mostly on social media.
The Navy is quietly debating whether to rename the future USS Doris Miller — the first aircraft carrier ever slated to honor a Black and enlisted sailor — after Donald Trump instead, because nothing says "respect for service" like sidelining an actual war hero for a guy whose most famous battle was against his own bone spurs.
Doris "Dorie" Miller, a mess attendant at Pearl Harbor, grabbed an anti-aircraft gun he wasn’t even trained on, shot down at least one Japanese plane, and dragged wounded sailors to safety. For that, he became the first Black service member to receive the Navy Cross. Under Trump’s first term, the Navy decided to finally name a carrier after him. Now, months of internal discussions are focused on whether to erase that milestone so the ship can instead double as a 100,000-ton floating MAGA billboard.
Officials say Miller is being considered for the Medal of Honor, which would conveniently nudge him into the "destroyer" tier of naming conventions, freeing up the big shiny carrier slot for a president whose closest brush with combat was yelling at staff on Truth Social. The final call will rest with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao — two men now positioned to decide whether the Navy honors a Black hero of democracy or leans fully into the Dear Leader Aircraft Carrier model of civil-military relations.
As a bonus, this fourth Ford-class carrier may be among the first to feature Trump’s preferred steam catapults instead of the newer electromagnetic launch system, because if you’re going to rename a ship after him, you might as well retrofit the technology to match his policy style: loud, inefficient, and decades behind the rest of the world.
Michael Cohen, pausing between calling Trump a conman and calling him ‘boss,’ while mentally drafting his pardon application.
Michael Cohen, the man who once called himself Trump’s “attack dog with a law license,” has now returned to the kennel. After years of describing Trump as a racist, predator, conman, wannabe dictator and existential threat to democracy, Cohen is back on the radio calling him “boss” and being praised for having “recanted everything you said.” Nothing says totally innocent president like your convicted fixer doing a public loyalty ritual on 77WABC.
This is the same Cohen who pled guilty to campaign finance crimes, tax evasion, bank fraud and lying to Congress – explicitly saying he did it to cover up Trump’s “dirty deeds,” warning there might never be a peaceful transfer of power, and begging the country not to let what happened to him happen to the whole republic. He then wrote books about how Trump weaponized the Department of Justice against critics and spent years on a podcast calling Trump a “boorish cartoon misogynist” and “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain” while openly hoping he’d rot in prison.
Now Trump is back in the Oval Office, Cohen’s Biden clemency bid has flopped, and suddenly he “felt pressured and coerced” by prosecutors and would very much like a pardon please. The man who once testified that Trump wanted to be “autocrat, supreme leader, dictator” is now demonstrating, live, how that works: you either praise the dear leader, or you get crushed. It’s less a reconciliation and more a cautionary tale about what happens when you build a presidency on crime, revenge, and broken people who will say anything to survive.
