The Blog
28 essays and counting — each one sourced, cited, and written with the conviction that facts still matter.
Rhode Island documented storm damage at ten times the federal threshold. Denied. New Jersey, four times over. Denied. Meanwhile, six red states got approved in a single week, with a Truth Social victory lap about $846 million the very day the denials landed. Snow doesn't check your voter registration — but apparently your president does.
It paid the largest known media defamation settlement in American history for airing claims its own stars privately called crazy. It won another lawsuit by arguing that no reasonable viewer expects facts from its biggest show. And now two dozen of its personalities run the federal government. At what point are we allowed to stop calling it news?
An anti-ICE protest in Texas turned violent — a police officer was shot — and the sentences ran to fifty, seventy, even a hundred years, one of them reportedly thirty years for moving a box of zines. The men who plotted to overturn an election and helped beat 140 officers at the Capitol? Pardoned. A tale of two justices.
We're told universal healthcare is a fantasy the country can't afford — right after conjuring a $300 billion fund to rebuild the nation we just bombed and $14 million to paint a reflecting pool that promptly turned green. Here's the math they'd rather you never do.
He promised an unconditional surrender from Iran, and — credit where it's due — he delivered one. There's just one glass-shard-in-your-heel detail: the party doing the surrendering is us. A field guide to losing while spiking the football.
'Everyone just needs to tone it down' is a comfortable blanket of false equivalence — one that lets us ignore the screaming fire in the kitchen because someone in the living room sighed too loudly. On the structural difference between presidential rhetoric and a 19-year-old on TikTok.
Trading Tylenol for tinfoil. The President declared an autism link based not on peer-reviewed data but on a feeling he had that morning. Then scientists in Liverpool published the definitive, evidence-based rebuttal. A case study in governing by gut.
Another Friday, another school shooting — this time through the stained-glass windows of a Catholic school. In a sane world it would be a national crisis. In this term, it's a line item, and the official response is to dismantle the very policies that were finally working.
The nonpartisan CBO projects Trump's proposed tax cuts would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. A familiar playbook: detonate the deficit, then blame the 'socialist spending' of the other side when the bill comes due.
It's a difference so fundamental it renders many conversations moot before they begin: one side asks 'what does the evidence say?' and the other asks 'what feels right to me?' A field guide to the epistemic universe where pawns move diagonally just because you want them to.
Harvard, treated like a rogue state in need of sanctions. Blocking international students doesn't protect American jobs — it pushes the brightest minds into the welcoming arms of rival nations, and forfeits nearly $38 billion in the process. Isolationism dressed up as patriotism.
The last of the major credit agencies has finally seen the glaringly obvious, downgrading the United States from a pristine AAA to a slightly less shiny AA1. A sense of vindication — if the news weren't so predictably depressing. The emperor has no clothes, and he's running up a massive tab.
If you were holding your breath waiting for the Republican-controlled House to hold this administration accountable for anything, you can exhale — preferably into a paper bag. On resolutions of inquiry, partisan shielding, and the guardrails coming off one blocked vote at a time.
Apparently what America truly needs is a substantially enlarged Alcatraz, decreed via Truth Social after what was surely an inspiring viewing of 'The Rock.' A classic Trumpian move: conjure a spectacle, stoke the fear, and hope nobody notices the due process quietly evaporating.
USAID has been an instrument of American soft power for over sixty years — saving lives, fighting disease, building democratic institutions. Now an unelected tech mogul's 'Department of Government Efficiency' is gutting it with alarming speed and a shocking disregard for the consequences.
Trump treated the global economy like a claw machine — jiggling the controls and hoping something valuable drops out. Spoiler: it mostly just shakes everything precariously, while someone close to the decision-making quietly buys low and sells high.
Rising gas prices weren't enough — now Trump's trade war is reportedly delaying the Nintendo Switch 2. Because nothing says 'greatest economy in history' like rationing your video game consoles until 2026.
Obama, that paragon of measured restraint, finally weighed in on the daily circus — 'deeply concerned,' and reminding us that 'the most important office in this democracy is the citizen.' For the rest of us, the concern has just been called Tuesday.
Billionaires lost $277 billion in a single day to Trump's tariffs — roughly the emotional equivalent of you losing a twenty in the laundry. The rest of us don't get to shrug it off quite so casually.
Fresh off a golf outing, Trump has reportedly decided penguins are the key to... something. The 'penguin tax' is performative grievance dressed as policy — and, surprise, you're the one who pays for it.
Turns out court orders are just spicy suggestions in Trump's America — carrying roughly the weight of a tweet from a bot account with 12 followers. Who knew the Constitution had a snooze button?
Trump demanded a televised 'thank you' from a wartime president and then critiqued his wardrobe. A diplomatic faux pas, sure — but really a calculated bit of performance art aimed straight at Moscow's applause.
The bill for years of anti-science rhetoric is finally coming due, paid in the cruelest currency imaginable. A measles death in West Texas — the first in decades — and somehow we put Dracula in charge of the blood bank.
Turns out 'America First' means first in line to cozy up to the world's most notorious dictators. We voted with Russia, North Korea, and Sudan against condemning the invasion of Ukraine — like a firefighter setting the building ablaze while lecturing everyone on fire safety.
Twelve trans athletes in all of college sports, and the full weight of the federal government gets aimed at them. That's not problem-solving — it's punching down, dressed up as policy, from a man who thinks we're 'wasting money making mice transgender.'
Just the name sounds like a dystopian sci-fi flick — but Project 2025 is a very real hostile-takeover manual for the American presidency, and Trump is eyeing it like a kid in a candy store.
He's back, and we've entered the theme park from hell. Over 1,500 January 6 pardons, exits from Paris and the WHO, and — the pièce de résistance — renaming the Gulf of Mexico. It almost feels like satire, but sadly it's just Tuesday.
Buckle up, buttercup — we've officially entered the 'hold my beer' phase of American democracy. A convicted, twice-impeached, fraud-liable felon is back in the Oval Office, and the next four years promise a masterclass in chaos.
