The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

An American humanitarian worker who caught Ebola while trying to help people in the DRC has been flown to Germany for treatment, because apparently if you want functioning public health infrastructure you now go to Europe. Germany calmly notes there’s "no danger for the general population" and that they were asked to help because of their Ebola expertise and the shorter flight time. Imagine having a government that responds to a deadly virus with competence instead of press conferences.

Back in Washington, the Trump administration looked at this complex outbreak and decided the real enemy is… Americans with valid passports. Using a transportation authority called Title 49, the White House is blocking US citizens in or recently out of the DRC from boarding commercial flights to the United States, shoving them onto a "do-not-board" list until they’ve spent 21 days in some other country. You know, the classic constitutional principle: "No American shall be allowed back into America until they’ve proven they can loiter in a random third nation first."

About two dozen Americans who thought they lived in a country that would let them come home in a crisis are now discovering that "support" from the State Department means, at best, paperwork and vibes while they wait out a de facto quarantine in places that are not the United States. Public health experts have long warned about Ebola’s lethality; they probably didn’t anticipate the part where the US government would treat its own citizens like contaminated FedEx packages that need to be rerouted through a different hub.

America’s finest legal minds have done it again: in Trump v Slaughter, the supreme court took a 91-year-old precedent protecting independent agencies, stared straight into the heart of the civil service, and said, "what if the president could just fire everyone who annoys him?" In a 6-3 ruling, they effectively handed Trump and every future president a loyalty-test button for watchdogs, regulators, and anyone else whose job used to be "follow the law" rather than "please the guy on Truth Social."

Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic FTC commissioner Trump himself appointed in 2018, learned she’d been fired while helping with her kid’s Beauty and the Beast rehearsal, which is almost too on the nose. She and fellow commissioner Alvaro Bedoya were both canned, sued, briefly won reinstatement, and then watched as the Court turned their case into a constitutional permission slip for presidential purges. Slaughter calls it a "dagger in the heart" of the civil service; the Federalist Society calls it Tuesday.

The ruling doesn’t just nuke one FTC commissioner’s job, it invites a future where every independent agency—those pesky entities that regulate markets, enforce antitrust, and occasionally inconvenience billionaires—knows that crossing a president or his donors can get them instantly fired. Slaughter is openly warning about a pay-to-play government where wealthy backers get favors and regulators get pink slips. So yes, the United States still has agencies with fancy seals and mission statements; they’re just now one angry president away from becoming set dressing for an oligarchy.

Marco Rubio, now secretary of state and apparently also secretary of no consequences ever, has launched a full-blown campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court because it might one day inconvenience US soldiers, Border Patrol agents, or the occasional allied prime minister accused of bombing civilians. He’s out here warning that American officials could be “dragged before an international court” by scary foreign judges whose radical agenda includes such extremist concepts as "don’t commit war crimes in other people’s countries."

The State Department plan is as subtle as a Trump tweet: pressure countries to abandon the ICC or face US sanctions, travel bans, and visa revocations. So if your government wants US aid, you’re expected to help kneecap the only court on Earth that can prosecute atrocities when local systems won’t. As Kenneth Roth helpfully notes, Rubio is just slapping a "sovereignty" sticker on what is transparently a quest for blanket impunity for American and allied war crimes. Minor detail: the ICC doesn’t even claim jurisdiction over crimes committed inside the US.

The Trump-Rubio axis has already sanctioned the ICC prosecutor, his deputies, six judges, a UN special rapporteur, and three Palestinian human rights groups for the high crime of documenting possible Israeli and US war crimes. Now they’re floating sanctions on the entire tribunal, which would make it illegal for Americans, banks, and companies to work with the court at all. According to human rights advocates, this isn’t just hypocrisy; it may itself amount to obstruction of justice under the Rome Statute. So yes, the administration’s strategy for avoiding war-crimes charges is to commit more crimes against the system that prosecutes war crimes. Bold.

Rubio insists he’s saving the “rules-based international order” by smashing the only institution that occasionally enforces any rules on powerful countries. As one advocate put it, he’s not dismantling the ICC brick by brick so much as kicking over what was left of the post–World War II legal order to make sure that from Ukraine to Sudan to Palestine, anyone with enough firepower and a Washington lobbyist can go back to the simpler era where the only real international law was "who’s going to stop us?"

At the University of North Texas, an exhibit by Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez lasted about as long as due process at an ICE check-in. His show, Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá — Neither from Here Nor from There, featured giant Mexican paleta sculptures with handcuffs, replica guns, rosaries, and popsicle sticks stamped with a parody ICE logo reading: "U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement". You know, a factual statement.

The exhibit had already run peacefully at Boston University, but once it hit Texas, it apparently triggered the state’s Standing Your Ground Against Metaphor statute. Within days, students started pinging the artist: the show was suddenly shut down, works quietly removed, and administrators started speaking fluent Bureaucratic Passive Voice about "concerns" and "procedures." Translation: you can enroll, pay tuition, and live with the consequences of immigration policy — you just can’t visually criticize the people enforcing it.

So on a campus where a quarter of the students are Hispanic, an artist who literally grew up in East Dallas was told, effectively, that his experience of U.S. immigration enforcement is too spicy for the gallery walls. The message from the state that worships "free speech": by all means, celebrate tacos and folklórico — but the minute you mention cages, handcuffs, or the agency doing the caging, the First Amendment gets deported.