Latest posts
-
The Golden Throne of Mar-a-Lincoln: When Optics Replace Government
It is a curious image of the modern presidency: the country in a government shutdown, the courts ordering the Department of Agriculture to raid emergency funds to keep SNAP afloat, and the Commander-in-Chief posting 24 glossy photos of his newly renovated Lincoln Bathroom, complete with black and white statuary marble, gold handles on the tub,
-
Judicial Interference and Other Inconvenient Miracles: How Two Judges Just Fed America While the White House Starved It for Sport
Somewhere between the concept of governance and the art of extortion, the Trump administration decided that feeding 42 million Americans during a shutdown was “optional.” The Department of Agriculture, apparently moonlighting as a nihilist book club, announced it would simply stop issuing SNAP benefits when the clock struck midnight on the first of the month.
-
The Art of the Tariff Deal: China Takes A Wrecking Ball To Trump
It takes a special kind of genius to spend ten months lighting the economy on fire only to celebrate putting out one match. President Donald Trump has done it again, staging a “historic tariff breakthrough” that cuts the fentanyl import duty from 20 percent to 10 percent and lowers the overall average tariff rate from
-
Welcome to the Feed, Citizen: Elon Musk’s Grok Will Now Decide What You Think
You wake up, open Twitter, and the first thing you see is a video of a toaster on fire subtitled “BREAKING: Free Speech.” You scroll. Next up: a paid post from a billionaire who just discovered poverty. You scroll again, and the same post appears, this time with AI-generated replies debating whether the toaster identifies
-
Trump White House Halloween You Can’t Unsee: Voldemort, Maleficent, and the Budget Ring of Power
Under the glitter and smoke, the costumes translate into deregulation, propaganda, and cuts that land on real people. There are holidays that ask for reverence, others that ask for ritual. Halloween asks for honesty. Put the thing you want on your face and watch the room tell you who you are. At the White House,
-
The Missing Congresswoman: How Mike Johnson Turned a 42-Point Win Into a Hostage Situation
It takes a special kind of cynicism to lose an election by forty-two points and still claim victory through bureaucracy. Enter Speaker Mike Johnson, the man who can make “government by inaction” sound like constitutional originalism. Adelita Grijalva—daughter of longtime Arizona Representative Raúl Grijalva, former Tucson school board president, and newly elected congresswoman for Arizona’s
-
The Starve and Shred Strategy: How Trump Turned the Shutdown Into a Weapon of Mass Deprivation
By now, Americans should know better than to mistake cruelty for incompetence. But here we are again, watching a government shutdown framed as bureaucratic “discipline” when it’s really just budgetary arson disguised as fiscal virtue. The Bulwark’s analysis this week pulled the curtain all the way back. Speaker Mike Johnson, playing the human air freshener
-
The Gospel According to Hypocritical Christians: How Trump and MAGA Baptized Greed and Called It Policy
There is a curious arithmetic in American Christianity, a kind of divine math that turns compassion into socialism, wealth into righteousness, and selective literacy into law. It goes something like this: when it comes to who sleeps with whom, suddenly the Bible is binding federal code, the Supreme Court is a Sunday school, and the
-
Making America Gaudy Again: Trump Dismisses U.S. Commission of Fine Arts To Green Light Mussolini DC Program
It’s official: Washington, D.C. has entered its Versailles phase. CBS News reports that President Donald Trump has summarily dismissed all six sitting members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts—the body that, for more than a century, has ensured that the nation’s capital doesn’t look like a suburban megachurch with delusions of grandeur. The firings
-
Welcome to the Golden Age of Layoffs: Where Jobs Go to Die and Stocks Go to Heaven
There’s an old rule in politics: if you can’t fix the problem, fire the statistician. And sure enough, President Trump has done exactly that, sacking the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the crime of arithmetic. Because in this second-term economy, math itself has become subversive. Without the Bureau’s honest numbers, the government