trump’s favorite ex-mayor loses his taxpayer-funded get-out-of-lawsuits card
Eric Adams, freshly off the Trump administration’s legal airlift program, wonders why New York City won’t keep footing the bill for his 1993 problems.
Eric Adams, former New York City mayor and part-time Trump administration fan club member, is discovering a harsh new reality: when you’re no longer in power, the city stops paying your lawyers to fend off sexual assault lawsuits from the 1990s. The Mamdani administration has moved to pull city representation from Adams in a case brought under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, arguing that allegedly demanding sexual favors in exchange for career help as a cop was not, shockingly, "within the scope" of his city employment.
Adams, who bailed out of last year’s Democratic primary after a federal corruption case was magically dismissed thanks to an "extraordinary" Trump administration intervention, spent his twilight political days painting Zohran Mamdani as a dangerous, out-of-touch, terror-enabling Muslim — then endorsed Andrew Cuomo, because this saga apparently needed even more disgraced New York politicians. Now Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, is politely insisting that the corporation counsel is acting independently while the law department quietly cuts off legal funding not just for Adams, but for two of his close allies as well.
The same city lawyers who once called the allegations against Adams "ludicrous" and promised "full vindication" are now backing away like they just realized what they’ve been standing in. Adams, for his part, remains "confident the facts will prevail" and continues to take shots at Mamdani on social media — a bold strategy for a man whose corruption case was airlifted out of danger by the Trump administration and who is now learning that post-Trump patronage doesn’t come with lifetime legal immunity.
#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump’s ambassador watches rfk jr play measles roulette in samoa
Donald Trump and Ivanka politely endure Scott Brown’s remarks, presumably unaware that a few years later he’ll be the Trump-era ambassador quietly adjacent to an RFK Jr anti-vax tour that precedes a lethal measles outbreak. Presidential personnel office really nailed this one.
Trump’s former New Zealand/Samoa ambassador Scott Brown – the guy who turned his New Hampshire backyard into a GOP petting zoo – turns out to have been well-briefed that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s 2019 Samoa trip was all about his anti-vaccine crusade. State department emails show Brown was alerted that Kennedy was heading into a country where vaccination rates had cratered, two babies had just died from a botched MMR shot, and public trust was hanging by a thread. Perfect time to fly in America’s leading anti-vax conspiracy salesman for a little informal diplomacy.
While the deputy chief of mission scrambled to keep the embassy’s fingerprints off the visit, Brown stayed in the loop as Kennedy’s presence helped validate local anti-vaxxers. Months later, Samoa was slammed by a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, mostly children under five. Kennedy has since claimed he had “nothing to do with people not vaccinating” and that the trip had “nothing to do with vaccines” – testimony that newly released emails now suggest was, at best, creative writing and, at worst, lying to the Senate by the sitting US health secretary.
The punchline: Brown later boasts about helping Kennedy prep for those same confirmation hearings, while running for Senate himself in a cycle where Republicans are suddenly terrified that the anti-vax monster they fed might eat their midterms. The Trump administration’s legacy lives on: a health secretary accused of misleading Congress about a trip that helped supercharge a deadly outbreak, and a Trump ambassador who watched the whole thing unfold from the diplomatic balcony and now wants a promotion.
#anti-science#lawlessness#forever-grifting
trump taps senate cage fighter to run protest‑shooting agency
Markwayne Mullin, seen here cosplaying as a serious lawmaker instead of a guy who challenges witnesses to cage matches, prepares to take over the agency that just shot protesters and called them terrorists.
The Department of Homeland Security, fresh off killing two US citizens at protests in Minnesota and branding them "domestic terrorists," is getting a new boss: Senator Markwayne Mullin, a former MMA fighter whose most famous Hill moment is challenging the Teamsters president to a brawl. So yes, the agency currently under fire for shooting protesters is being handed to a guy whose core competency is literally punching people for money. Truly a natural progression for Trump’s vision of “law and order.”
Kristi Noem, who oversaw the charmingly named Operation Metro Surge before it spiraled into lethal federal violence, was "sacked" and then immediately rewarded with a made‑up job as "Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas"—which sounds less like a diplomatic role and more like a Marvel knockoff you’d find in the bargain bin at Dollar Tree. In her place, Trump is nominating a first‑term senator whose main qualification is unwavering loyalty and a deep enthusiasm for locking up undocumented immigrants.
While DHS struggles with a funding impasse that’s leaving TSA understaffed and airports backed up for miles, the White House is laser‑focused on what really matters: installing a hyper‑partisan loyalist to run a sprawling internal security apparatus that includes CBP, ICE, TSA, the Secret Service, and FEMA. Protesters are being killed, dissenters are branded terrorists, and the guy who tried to start a fistfight in a Senate hearing is about to be in charge of the people with guns and badges. America’s longest‑running reality show, “Killing Democracy,” has clearly been renewed for another season.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump discovers the first amendment is optional during wartime
Trump, discovering that if you call journalism 'treason' often enough, some TV executives will fact-check the Constitution with their accountants.
Trump has decided that reporting on his disastrous Iran war is no longer journalism, it's treason — because when your foreign policy is falling apart in the Strait of Hormuz, the real enemy is apparently anyone who notices. He’s publicly musing about charging news organizations with treason for supposedly "helping America's enemies" by reporting facts he doesn’t like, which is exactly the kind of thing you hear from strongmen right before the independent press mysteriously forgets how to exist.
Not content with yelling at TV screens, he’s got help from his personal censorship squad. FCC chair Brendan Carr is out here hinting that broadcasters could lose their licenses if they don’t produce sufficiently patriotic infotainment, while Secretary of Defense and former Fox guy Pete Hegseth is demanding more flag-waving headlines and daydreaming about CNN being "brought to heel" by Trump-friendly owners. Meanwhile, CBS is already drifting into Trump-flattering territory under new management, respected journalists are bailing, and oligarchs are buying up media like it’s clearance day on the First Amendment.
Legal experts like Jameel Jaffer keep patiently explaining that the government doesn’t get to dictate coverage — constitutional bedrock and all that — but Trump has figured out he doesn’t need to win in court if he can bleed outlets dry with lawsuits, regulatory threats, and ownership pressure. The goal isn’t actual treason convictions; it’s to make honest reporting so expensive and dangerous that newsrooms quietly choose self-censorship over bankruptcy. A would-be autocrat in the Oval Office and a cowed, billionaire-captured press corps during an unpopular war: what could possibly go wrong for what’s left of American democracy?
#fascism#killing-democracy
trump deports the workforce, is shocked there’s no workforce
A half-built South Texas apartment complex waits patiently for workers who are currently busy being "protected" out of the nation’s workforce by ICE.
South Texas builders who enthusiastically voted for Trump’s "deport the criminals" crusade are now standing on empty job sites, staring at unfinished foundations and bankruptcy paperwork, wondering how their pro-deportation, pro-construction president somehow managed to deport the construction. ICE has been raiding Rio Grande Valley construction sites 10 to 15 times, scooping up workers — including people with proper documentation — often without warrants, because apparently if a job site isn’t fenced in, it’s just a constitutional-free petting zoo for federal agents.
The result: residential construction volume down almost 60 percent, companies filing for bankruptcy for the first time in decades, $5.3 million drops in sales, and long-time employers forced to lay people off after 40 years. Local businesses are getting crushed as shoppers stay home out of fear, while a region that swung hard to Trump in 2024 now discovers that "mass deportation" and "booming economy" don’t actually fit in the same sentence. Builders had to fly to Washington to beg ICE to stop treating their job sites like a reality show manhunt; only after they literally fenced in their own projects did the raids ease up — by which point the damage to the economy, and to Trump’s support, was already poured in concrete.
Democrats, who previously treated the 80-percent-Latino Rio Grande Valley like a "set it and forget it" voting bloc, are now back in the parade circuit trying to scoop up disillusioned Trump voters who suddenly realized that when you cheer on a deportation machine, it doesn’t stop at "other people." Turns out the American dream Trump sold them was less "build 196 apartments in a year" and more "good luck finishing in three years if ICE doesn’t arrest your entire workforce first."
#anti-immigration#killing-democracy
trumprx: because what americans really needed was another coupon site
TrumpRx.gov, proudly offering a handful of discounts on drugs you could already get cheaper elsewhere — now with extra presidential branding at no additional savings.
Americans are skipping doses and rationing meds, so naturally the Trump administration has rolled out its bold solution to Big Pharma greed: a sad little coupon website with 54 drugs and a logo. TrumpRx.gov is being sold as a revolutionary cost-cutting tool, but it can’t be used with insurance, doesn’t count toward deductibles, and mostly features drugs that already have generics or other discounts elsewhere. So it’s less "healthcare reform" and more "promo code, but make it presidential."
Instead of building real negotiating power or structural reform, the White House quietly outsourced the guts of TrumpRx to GoodRx’s existing system — same network, same processing codes, just with extra Trump branding slapped on top like a gold decal on a rental car. Experts politely note that the site is "of limited use" and would drop to around 22 drugs if they removed the ones with cheaper generics, but the administration is already fantasizing about Congress "codifying" its Most Favored Nation deals into law, a thing Congress has shown precisely zero interest in doing.
Meanwhile, the uninsured — the people "getting screwed the most," as one expert puts it — get a glorified search page that doesn’t let them buy anything directly, doesn’t fix pharmacy benefit manager games, and doesn’t touch the rebate-driven racket that keeps prices high. The administration is calling this part of a "Great Healthcare Plan" that somehow always exists just over the next hill, once they pass some legislation that doesn’t exist, for a program that barely functions. It’s the same Trump-era formula every time: maximum branding, minimal policy, and a lingering question of who, exactly, is actually getting the discount here.
#forever-grifting#healthcare
dr. oz performs open-heart surgery on medicaid with a chainsaw
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz testifies while the Trump administration explains that the best way to save Medicaid is to take a blowtorch to it and see who survives.
Minnesota families with disabled kids are finding out what happens when you put Dr. Mehmet Oz in charge of Medicaid: he calls it a "crackdown on fraud," then reaches for the bone saw. Federal prosecutors uncovered real Medicaid fraud in Minnesota, so the Trump administration responded with its usual nuance — by freezing hundreds of millions, maybe billions in Medicaid funds that actual patients rely on to, you know, live. The message from Washington: if some crooks stole money, better punish the children with cerebral palsy.
Oz is out there declaring this is all the fault of "leadership" in Minnesota, while health policy experts are standing on the sidelines yelling that this level of funding threat is unprecedented and could destabilize care for people nationwide. Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison is now suing, accusing the administration of its trademark strategy: "cut first, no matter what the law says or who gets hurt, and ask questions later, if at all." The administration insists this is about protecting taxpayers; coincidentally, it also advances Trumpworld’s long-standing dream of shredding Medicaid without having to bother with Congress or pesky things like legislation. Fun fraud-fighting twist: the people actually getting punished are the ones in wheelchairs, not the ones in cufflinks.
#healthcare#killing-democracy#forever-grifting
another trump counterterrorism chief nopes out
Joe Kent, Trump’s former top counterterrorism official, seen here realizing the real threat to national security was his own chain of command.
The Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, has resigned, because apparently the War on Terror was no match for the War on Basic Competence happening inside this White House. NPR’s Steve Inskeep is talking to Kent’s co-author Marty Skovlund, presumably to answer the burning question: what finally broke him—policy disagreements, ethical lines, or just too many meetings where the president asked if ISIS could be solved with a tweet and a golf summit?
Yet again, the person in charge of keeping Americans safe from terrorists has decided that staying in Trump’s national security apparatus is somehow less safe than leaving it. At this point, the counterterrorism portfolio looks like a revolving door with a security clearance. But sure, sleep well, America—your terrorist threat matrix is being updated by whoever hasn’t resigned, been sidelined, or rage-quit on live TV this week.
#national-security#killing-democracy
illinois democrat runs on 'absolutely not, mr. trump'
Juliana Stratton, apparently the rare politician whose hiring policy for Trump appointees is a simple, elegant "absolutely not."
In Illinois, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton just won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate by making what now counts as a bold, radical promise in American politics: she will not help Donald Trump staff his authoritarian fan club. Among a crowded field of Democrats, Stratton basically said, "If it's a Trump appointee, the answer is no," which, in this timeline, passes for a comprehensive pro-democracy platform.
While Republicans are out here treating the Senate like LinkedIn Premium for extremists, grifters, and aspiring theocrats, Stratton is openly campaigning on the idea that maybe we don’t need to rubber-stamp every judge, saboteur, and lobbyist Trump digs out of a Heritage Foundation spreadsheet. Strongly opposing the Trump administration is now the minimum job requirement for anyone pretending to care about the Constitution, so congratulations to Illinois voters for at least reading the fine print before handing over the nuclear codes’ HR department.
#killing-democracy#losses
kari lake tries state tv cosplay, judge says 'absolutely not'
Kari Lake proudly displaying a photo of the newsroom she tried to turn into Trump TV before a federal judge reminded her that ‘media freedom’ isn’t just a chyron graphic.
Turns out you actually can’t just waltz into the U.S. Agency for Global Media, crown yourself Dear Leader, and put 1,042 Voice of America employees on ice because you’d prefer a more Trump-flavored propaganda channel. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered all those staffers back to work, calling Kari Lake’s attempt to gut VOA “arbitrary and capricious” — which is lawyer-speak for “you don’t get to smash a 1940s anti-Nazi institution just because you’re mad about fact-checking.”
Lamberth had already ruled last month that Lake unlawfully grabbed almost all the powers of the agency’s CEO and played musical titles with herself — senior adviser, “acting CEO” (a job she’s not legally eligible for), then deputy CEO — like a kid trying on Halloween costumes, except the costume was “unaccountable state media boss.” Now he’s added that she also blew off Congress’ intent for the agency’s funding and never bothered to consider what shutting down one of the world’s largest independent news broadcasters might do. Minor detail.
Under Lake’s guidance, the agency tried to ship VOA Director Michael Abramowitz off to a tiny shortwave facility in North Carolina and then fire him when he didn’t salute the exile order. Meanwhile, a network that used to reach 361 million people a week in 49 languages was hacked down to just six language services — an impressive achievement if your goal is to help authoritarian regimes by taking one of their few remaining irritants off the air. Lake, naturally, calls the rulings “judicial activism,” because nothing screams limited government like unilaterally dismantling a congressionally funded news outlet founded to counter Nazi propaganda.
Voice of America once modeled what journalism in a pluralistic democracy looks like: reporting both Allied victories and defeats to build credibility. The Trump-Lake version of that model appears to be: fire everyone, hollow out the newsroom, cancel Reuters and AP, and see how close you can get to a taxpayer-funded campaign channel before a federal judge yanks the plug. For now, the courts have reminded the White House that “state media” is a fantasy, not a job description.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
‘apparently i’m an idiot’ is the new trump 2024 bumper sticker
A Pennsylvania Trump voter stares into the camera, realizing too late that bombing Iran and cheap gas don’t usually come in the same package.
NBC finds a three-time Trump voter in Pennsylvania who has finally connected the galaxy-brain dots between "tough on Iran" chest-thumping and paying more to fill up his F-150. After backing Trump through three election cycles, the man looks at the Iran war, looks at gas prices, and concludes: “Apparently I’m an idiot.” The good news is he’s right. The bad news is the rest of us are stuck living in the foreign policy demolition derby he helped buy.
This is the MAGA hangover tour: voters who cheered on "maximum pressure" and "America First" are now discovering that when a president treats war like a Fox News segment break, it has consequences beyond the rally merch table. While Trump is reportedly being handed off-ramps from the Iran war like it’s a Costco sample aisle, people back home are just now realizing that maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t put a chronically unserious reality TV landlord in charge of nuclear-adjacent geopolitics.
So now we get the confessionals. "Apparently I’m an idiot" is less a personal reflection and more a national epitaph for the era where voters believed a guy who went bankrupt selling steaks would magically lower gas prices while lobbing missiles in the Middle East. The Iran war is grinding on, the costs are piling up, and the only real lesson learned is that there’s no refund policy on electing a chaos goblin as commander in chief.
#killing-democracy#full-stupid#imperialism
president for life comes for the libertarian nerd
Trump, pictured here auditioning for the role of RNC, DNC, and Elections Board all at once, explains that real separation of powers means separating disloyal Republicans from their jobs.
Donald Trump has discovered a new use for the presidency: local Kentucky HR manager. Perpetually aggrieved that Rep. Thomas Massie occasionally remembers Congress is supposed to be a separate branch of government, Trump is now throwing the weight of the Oval Office behind Massie’s primary challenger in hopes of finally firing the guy who keeps reading the Constitution at the staff meeting.
Massie, a seven-term Republican and professional pebble in Trump’s shoe, has long annoyed the Dear Leader by doing unpatriotic things like questioning executive power grabs and occasionally voting like Congress is more than a fan club. So Trump is deploying his favorite governing tool — public revenge endorsements — to send a message to the rest of the GOP: toe the line, or the president will personally show up in your district to replace you with someone who thinks Article II gives him the right to rearrange your career.
#retribution#killing-democracy
trump’s save america act tries to save america from voters
Senate Republicans bravely defending democracy from the terrifying threat of… people voting without their birth certificates on them.
Senate Republicans have kicked off debate on Trump’s beloved SAVE America Act, a bill that promises to "secure" elections by making it a lot harder for the wrong people — i.e., non-Republicans — to vote. The plan: force every American to cough up a passport or birth certificate just to register, demand photo ID even to vote by mail, and hand the Department of Homeland Security a handy new tool to flag "suspected non-citizens" for states to purge from the rolls. Nothing says small government like turning DHS into a national voter-screening squad.
The bill needs 60 votes, doesn’t have them, and everyone knows it. John Thune is promising an "extended debate" on Trump’s "No. 1 priority" that has approximately the same chance of passing as Trump has of reading it. Even the fantasy add-ons Trump wants — gutting mail voting and tossing in culture-war bonuses like bans on transgender athletes and gender-affirming care for minors — are doomed, because those amendments also need 60 votes. It’s less a legislative strategy and more a Fox News programming block accidentally printed as a bill.
Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, are calling it "a naked attempt to rig our elections" and say they’ll block it, while Republicans desperately wave around the one popular piece — photo ID — like it magically justifies the rest of the suppression machinery. Mike Lee, never one to miss an authoritarian cosplay opportunity, is already threatening primary challengers for any Republican who won’t burn down the Senate rules with a talking filibuster to push this thing. Thune, in a rare moment of lucidity, notes that maybe nuking your own incumbents to pass a dead-on-arrival bill could, tiny detail, cost them their majority.
So the Senate is now spending days pretending this has a future, so Trump can brag that his top priority is "on the floor" while everyone involved quietly admits it’s going nowhere. It’s not governance; it’s a live-action voter suppression infomercial, subsidized by your tax dollars, with DHS auditioning for the role of National Voter Purge Hotline.
#killing-democracy#fascism
trump declares oil emergency, democracy spill ‘contained’
A California coastline patiently waiting to find out whether it’s more expendable as habitat, tourist economy, or just another prop in Trump’s national security oil pageant.
After one of California’s worst oil spills shut a coastal pipeline in 2015, state regulators spent a decade saying, "absolutely not, this thing is a disaster." The Trump administration took one look at that record, launched a war on Iran, watched gas prices spike, and decided this was the perfect moment to dust off the Defense Production Act and order the pipeline back on, permits and state authority be damned. Why let boring things like environmental law or federalism get in the way when there’s crude to pump and donors to please?
Sable Offshore, which inherited Exxon’s oily mess in 2024, couldn’t get California to sign off, so Trump and energy secretary Chris Wright simply declared the pipeline "vital to national security" and flipped the switch from Washington. California’s response was to tell Sable to remove the pipeline from state park land and for Gavin Newsom to threaten lawsuits while pointing out the obvious: Trump started a war, bragged it would raise gas prices, and is now using that crisis to finally crack open California’s coastline for his industry buddies to "poison our beaches."
So oil is flowing again, seabirds are basically on a countdown clock, and the Defense Production Act has been repurposed from Cold War emergency tool to "help Texas oil guys override California voters." The administration calls it energy security; everyone else can see it’s just another episode of Executive Power Mad Libs: Fossil Fuel Edition.
#imperialism#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump tells unpaid tsa to keep working, promises thoughts and prayers on back pay
Passengers snake through a two-hour TSA line while Congress experiments with a new governance model called "what if we just don’t pay anyone?"
Congress is now treating airport security like a subscription service they forgot to renew. DHS is in its second month of a shutdown because Democrats are refusing to fund the department without reforms after federal immigration agents shot and killed two US citizens in Minneapolis. Republicans, naturally, have responded to this tiny request to stop killing Americans in the street by blocking any attempt to fund the non-immigration parts of DHS, including TSA. So TSA officers are "essential" enough to grope your shampoo but not essential enough to get a paycheck.
Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport, is now hosting two-hour security lines, Houston is clocking in at 90–100 minutes, and more than 300 TSA agents have quit because it turns out you can’t pay rent with patriotic vibes. The average TSA salary is about $35,000, fuel costs are spiking thanks to the US–Israel war in Iran, and officers are being told to keep showing up indefinitely for the low, low wage of zero dollars. As AFGE president Everett Kelley politely explains, workers are being treated as expendable meat shields so Congress can cosplay as tough on immigration.
Democrats tried the radical move of funding TSA and other non-immigration DHS agencies separately; Republicans said no, because if you can’t use people’s safety as leverage to preserve a brutal enforcement machine that just killed two citizens, what even is the point of power? Airline CEOs are now begging Congress to stop turning air travel into a live-action shutdown drill. And Donald Trump, broadcasting from Truth Social, has chimed in to urge TSA agents to "go to work" and promises he will never forget them. Which is convenient, since forgetting to pay them appears to be official policy.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration
trump discovers deepfakes, declares reality fake
Trump, moments before explaining that every video of him ever made was actually rendered on a Hillary-owned supercomputer in Ukraine.
Donald Trump has accused the BBC of using "AI-generated" clips of him, because when you’ve spent years on camera confessing things, threatening people, and blurting out crimes like a malfunctioning Roomba, eventually you need a new excuse. The new plan: whenever an unflattering clip appears, just scream "deepfake" and hope your followers treat it like the 11th Commandment.
This isn’t about tech literacy; it’s about building a permission structure for permanent denial. If every real video can be waved away as "AI," then no incriminating tape, no damning admission, no on-camera authoritarian rant can ever be used to hold him accountable. It’s the perfect arrangement for a guy whose greatest enemy is playback. Who needs state media when you can just declare all non-state media digitally forged?
So while normal people are worrying about AI cheating on tests and stealing artwork, Trump is pioneering the strongman use case: turn a real, serious technological threat into a universal alibi. Conveniently, the only footage that will remain unquestionably authentic is whatever comes from his own propaganda outlets—just a total coincidence, of course.
#killing-democracy#fascism#full-stupid
trump’s doj discovers grand juries have a spine, judge installs warning light
Jeanine Pirro at DOJ, moments before explaining that she’s “willing to take a no true bill” as long as she can keep shoveling Trump’s enemies into the grand jury furnace.
The Trump administration’s crusade to criminalize disobedience to illegal orders hit a small snag: a federal grand jury in D.C. refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers for the grave offense of posting a video reminding the military they don’t have to follow unlawful commands. Chief Judge James Boasberg responded by creating a new policy requiring that the court be notified whenever a grand jury refuses to play along with the administration’s prosecution fantasies, so there’s an official record every time Jeanine Pirro’s office tries to turn the Justice Department into Trump’s personal firing squad and gets laughed out of the room.
Boasberg’s order forces grand jury forepersons to report failed indictments under seal, ensuring the judiciary can track how often prosecutors are swinging wildly at political enemies and missing. This follows Pirro’s team failing to convince a single grand juror that telling soldiers not to follow illegal orders is “seditious behavior” worthy of death, despite Trump loudly demanding those lawmakers be arrested and tried for a capital crime because they hurt his feelings on social media.
Not satisfied with just criminalizing basic constitutional literacy, Pirro also went after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell with subpoenas so nakedly political that Boasberg torched them as an effort to “harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the president or to resign.” Pirro called him an “activist judge,” because in Trumpworld, a judge who stops you from abusing state power for Dear Leader is obviously the radical one. Meanwhile, her office quietly dropped a case against a man who burned an American flag after Boasberg raised the awkward question of whether the prosecution was about alleged park violations or that pesky First Amendment. The grand jury system was designed as a shield against exactly this kind of government overreach, and Trump and Pirro are furious to discover that sometimes the shield still works.
#killing-democracy#fascism
john roberts begs the arsonist to stop yelling at the fire department
Trump, moments after discovering that even a handpicked 6–3 Supreme Court occasionally reads the Constitution.
Chief Justice John Roberts went to Rice University and politely asked America’s most famous aspiring strongman to please, if it’s not too much trouble, stop personally targeting judges. He didn’t say Trump’s name, of course — just gently observed that "personally directed hostility" toward judges is "dangerous" and "has got to stop," as though the problem here is a minor vibes issue and not the sitting president screaming at the judiciary like it’s The Apprentice finale.
Trump, for his part, spent the weekend on Truth Social calling the Supreme Court a "weaponized and unjust Political Organization" that "RANSACKED" the country by striking down his sweeping tariffs. This, from the guy who got a 6-3 conservative court, then lost a 6-3 ruling where two of his own appointees — Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch — joined Roberts in telling him that, shockingly, the president does not get to run trade policy like a yard sale.
Not content with trashing the Supreme Court, Trump also went after Judge James Boasberg, calling him "Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control" for rulings the administration doesn’t like, including blocking a DOJ probe into Jerome Powell. Some Republicans are already floating impeachment, because why merely disagree with a judge’s ruling when you can try to remove him for insufficient loyalty to the Dear Leader?
Roberts has issued careful statements defending Boasberg and warning everyone to "dial down the temperature," while lower court judges quietly note that maybe, just maybe, a coordinated campaign to delegitimize the judiciary and threaten judges requires more than a strongly worded press release and a sigh. The American experiment is being stress-tested by a president calling judges enemies of the country, and the chief justice’s big counter-move is: asking nicely.
#killing-democracy#fascism#lawlessness
operation epic photo op: trump postpones china trip for war time
Trump explains to Xi that he’d love to talk trade, but first he has to finish his branded war event, ‘Operation Epic Fury.’
Trump has decided that his big summit with Xi Jinping can wait "five or six weeks" because he’s busy running Operation Epic Fury, which sounds less like a military campaign and more like a Monster Energy flavor. The China trip, originally scheduled for March 31–April 2 to talk tariffs and trade, is now on hold while the White House pretends the president is glued to the Situation Room instead of Fox News.
Administration officials insist this has absolutely nothing to do with Trump trying to strong-arm Beijing into helping reopen the Strait of Hormuz first. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent swears the delay isn’t about demanding that China police one of the world’s most sensitive shipping chokepoints, while Trump tells the Financial Times he’s… waiting for China’s answer on policing the Strait of Hormuz before the visit. Totally coherent strategy.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt dutifully recites that Trump’s "utmost responsibility" is ensuring the success of Operation Epic Fury, as if turning a war into a branding exercise is normal statesmanship. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just kneecapped much of Trump’s tariff carnival, the U.S.–China trade mess is still smoldering, and the big diplomatic reset with Xi is downgraded to "we’ll get back to you in a month or so" while the commander in chief shops his latest military sequel.
#imperialism#killing-democracy
trump offers citizenship fire sale while trying to cancel it at home
State Department window helpfully labeled: ‘Citizenship: Returns Desk →, No New Members ←’
The Trump administration has discovered one government service it does want to subsidize: helping people dump their US citizenship and run. The State Department is slashing the renunciation fee from $2,350 down to $450, below cost, so Washington can lose money processing a record wave of "get me out of here" paperwork. There’s a 30,000-case global backlog of people waiting to swear they never have to file with the IRS again, and Trump’s team has bravely stepped up to… make that line move faster.
This generosity, of course, is reserved for the kind of folks who can afford lawyers and offshore tax advice. The policy is framed as helping "accidental Americans" abroad navigate absurd tax rules, but the IRS’s own "expatriation list" only tracks those with a net worth above $2 million. So yes, the US is officially offering a discounted exit package to the global upper crust, while pretending this is all about bureaucratic compassion. Think of it as a loyalty program where the reward points are for leaving.
Meanwhile, as the administration makes it cheaper for people overseas to stop being American, it’s in court trying to stop people born here from ever being American in the first place. Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship is now headed to the supreme court, where the administration is seeking to rewrite the 14th amendment by vibes and Fox News segments. So the new doctrine is simple: if you’re rich and already a citizen, the government will underwrite your escape. If you’re poor and born here to non-citizen parents, the president would like a legal path to erase you.
US passports have already fallen out of the world’s top 10, now sitting in a proud tie with Malaysia, and the administration’s response is to accelerate the brain-and-asset drain while chipping away at who even counts as American. It’s an elegant system: hollow out the value of citizenship, subsidize the exit of the wealthy, and wage war on the constitutional guarantee for everyone else. Make America Great Again, by making it easier to leave and harder to belong.
#killing-democracy#anti-immigration#oligarchy
