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The day began with tabs, and it feels so long ago! There were these squirrel creatures called potoroos in the daily gif, but somehow the software decided the featured pic would be the thumbnail from the video. It works too.

When the Trump administration announced it would bypass the media altogether with a new “Trump TV” channel, it sparked fears that they would launch a North Korea style State TV propaganda network. Lucky for America, everyone working for Trump is too fucking lazy to do anything that ambitious.

Honestly, who among us hasn’t had a lavish destination wedding party thrown for us by a Russian oligarch? Donald Trump Jr. wants us to know it’s all perfectly fine, no worries. Investigation? Why? It’s not like the wedding was in Benghazi!

Funny, nobody likes Trump’s stupid war in Iran, especially not Republicans who would like to be elected to Congress so they can do nothing to stop it.

ICE may not have been in the headlines much lately, which may explain why they’ve done some godawful shit in the shadows. Here’s some bright light on the cockroaches.

Donald Trump lied nonstop to the United Nations again, just in case anyone had forgotten he’s a sociopath.

That’s it for today, we’ll be back in the morning with more news to fill the news hole! We love you.

Donald Trump dropped by the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday so he could once again remind the world he’s a lying psychopath who utterly rejects the values of international diplomacy upon which the United Nations was founded. You know, just in case anyone had forgotten in the year since he last addressed the UN.

Unfortunately, Trump’s speech was not drowned out by an idling helicopter, so the whole thing was recorded; you can watch it here if you don’t mind the damage it’ll do to your brain.

Trump’s biggest headline-grabber came when he casually mused — yet again — about committing a little light genocide if he feels like it. Trump insisted that the decision would be his alone, because he’s president and can do whatever he wants.

TRUMP: I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world?

Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

Trump added that maybe he wouldn’t have to kill an entire nation of 93 million people, because Iran will surely agree to a deal after the November US elections.

The New York Times put Trump’s ultimatum into historical context (gift link), which is a useful thing to consider now and then when we hear the US president saying insane shit, noting that Trump’s speech

amounted to a pure American rejection of the concept behind the U.N.’s founding in 1945: to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

The global body’s charter, written largely by the United States, expressly prohibited members from threatening or using force against a country’s territorial integrity unless acting in self-defense, or with the U.N.’s authorization.

Trump is so done with quaint old-fashioned notions like that, because he much prefers living in the late 19th Century and doing the whole “gunboat diplomacy” thing, but with murder drones and lots of exciting footage of explosions.

Throughout the speech, Trump doubled down on the theme that not only is the US the only nation that matters, but also that he alone is the great mover of US policy, no one else. He bragged (err, lied) that unlike the useless UN, he is a man of action, don’t question him:

[While] others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world.

He also insisted that, with his pointless quagmire in Iran, “we are settling years of unfinished business and we're doing it well,” although as we mentioned, he hasn’t yet decided whether the unfinished business will be “settled” by an agreement or by wiping Iran off the map, a thing he seems to think can be done with America’s “annihilate an entire country just like that” bomb (it’s secret).

Funny, though, he didn’t mention that his Iran war has dragged on for nearly seven months, after he repeatedly declared it won, over, or just a week or two away from total US victory.

While he was at it, Trump also celebrated his brilliant sneak attack on Venezuela in January, because doesn’t the US president have the power to kidnap foreign leaders and install replacements who’ll let Trump take those nations’ oil?

He was so excited about what he’d accomplished, insisting that “to the victor belong the spoils.” That has to be somewhere in the UN charter along with all the stupid peace crap.

But WAR wasn’t Trump’s only obsession. As he did last year, though not in as much detail, Trump insisted that science isn’t real, especially if companies that support him might find science an inconvenient truth. He announced that as of right now, “artficial intelligence” has officially been renamed “super intelligence,” because he likes to say “super” a lot, and there can be no international agreements limiting the technology, because that’d be a “globalist scheme” to hurt US tech firms.

The man with a “natural instinct for science” because his uncle was an MIT prof explained that calling predictive algorithms “artificial intelligence” is very bad, because “the use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake. And it is not fake; it's actually amazing, but we have to be careful.”

For the record, no, the computers aren’t “intelligent,” they just do pattern matching really fast, although often very badly too, so for fuckssake we shouldn’t be calling it “intelligence” at all, goddamn it.

But yes, Trump insisted that the official name is now “super intelligence,” apparently unaware that AI researchers already use that term for something completely different, a so-far hypothetical version of machine intelligence that “has cutting-edge cognitive functions and highly developed thinking skills more advanced than any human.”

Exactly nobody expects Trump’s term to reshape the field, but it will be mandatory in a lot of government documents that will need to be fixed after he’s gone. Actually, that’s one task that current non-intelligent “AI” could handle pretty easily without blowing us all up or converting all mass in the universe into paperclips. Or uploading everyone’s brain into a My Little Pony simulation.

In another remarkable display of saying a mostly true thing but turning it into a completely backwards lie, Trump went on to crow that artificial intelligence is no more a threat to humanity than climate change is.

TRUMP: The very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.

These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, that everything is going to be a total disaster. Same group of people! This is the group that came up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax, climate change, open borders.

As CNN notes, Trump has a lot wrong here: 1) No scientists have said we’ll all die in 12 years; they said, in 2018, that we had about that long to get the world off fossil fuels in time to prevent warming from increasing by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7° F) over pre-industrial norms, the somewhat arbitrary goal that still looked possible when the Paris climate agreement was formed.

Also (two lies at once): No, nobody swapped out “global warming” for “climate change” to “hide” that the planet is cooling, because it isn’t. Both terms are useful to the discussion, because greenhouse emissions are heating the planet. The many effects of that warming are what gets called “climate change.” And if anyone pushed for one term over the other, we should blame Frank Luntz, who advised George W. Bush in 2003 to talk about “climate change” because focus groups found voters were more likely to demand action to stop “global warming.”

And of course Trump’s claim that nobody has died due to climate change is an obscene lie, given that it’s already caused more extreme weather, droughts, food chain disruptions, and population migrations than there would have been without global warming. Here we’ll just go with CNN’s overview:

[Experts] widely disagree that “nobody” has died from the various impacts of a warming world. It’s impossible to pinpoint a precise death number, but some estimates total in the millions. The deaths are likely to continue; the World Health Organization says, “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”

We sort of wish we could teleport people into the pages of a book. Just send Trump, his Cabinet, and the top executives of the world’s fossil fuel companies into the first chapter of The Ministry for the Future (spoiler warnings at link), and we might see some changes, the fucking end.

OPEN THREAD.

[NYT (gift link) / Guardian / Politifact / CNN / The Hill]

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Wonkette For The Future

So we’ve moved past the “papers, please” phase and are now in the “arbitrary arrests and disappearing people” phase of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I know what you’re going to say, we’ve already been there! And you would be totally right to say that! But kids, listen, these people are trying their best to destroy global democracy so they can pick over its carcass, and it’s ramping up in really frightening ways and no one is coming to save us — except ourselves.

Anyway, here’s a roundup of ICE roundups in the last week or so.

Mobile Detention Facilities

This morning I woke up, looked at the news (a terrible mistake that I make every day) and discovered that ICE is once again talking about "mobile detention facilities,” at least in Pennsylvania. They want to pack vulnerable people seeking asylum into trains and ship them off to camps. That’s great, because every time refugees have been sent to camps it’s worked out really well for them and indeed for the whole country that it happens in, and there are never any long-lasting effects on populations at large!

This shift to “mobile” facilities has come after massive protests against those awful warehouse facilities that the federal government, sick monsters that they are, have been putting injured people, ill people, elderly people, and children in, people who have committed no crime at all.

Sidenote: No, really, did you know it’s not a crime to be undocumented? It’s a civil violation or a misdemeanor at most, referred to as “improper entry” in the codes, not “illegal entry.” It can become an actual crime if there are other things attached to it, but simply being in the USA without documentation is on par with rolling a stop sign, legally speaking, and a lot less dangerous. Folks here without papers aren’t even criminals, they are just trying to stay alive, and they came to the United States because we promised the entire world the American Dream. And it was a massive fucking lie.

Anyway, at least the warehouse centers are a failure, thanks to protests and lawsuits and watchdog groups and the part where they’re fucking building places to “concentrate” people in “camps.” ICE appears to be backing off those — at least for now.

Thousands Of Names Disappear From Online Portal

ICE is disappearing people. The government has now hidden the location of thousands and thousands of people with “final removal orders” from the United States, an unannounced change that has families, friends, and attorneys frantic as they try to find out where their loved ones or clients are being held — or where they have been sent, as the US government now sends people all over the world based on deals with other corrupt governments, which used to be called “human trafficking” before all the American news organizations lost their collective fucking spines.

Sure, a federal appeals court said that wasn’t lawful last week, but since when does the Trump administration give a shit about legality when there are so many crimes against humanity they are falling all over themselves to commit? And how would anybody know where people are being sent, if there is no record of where they are being sent? But I guess that’s the idea.

Moving on to a hideous story out of Texas:

ICE Monsters Shot And Partially Paralyzed A Young Father

A young father from Venezuela, Wilber Garcés Pérez, was making a DoorDash delivery in Austin, because he’s supporting his family — which includes a child with disabilities. And of course the dipshit untrained amateur who rammed his car then shot him “just happened” to not be wearing a body camera. It’s crazy how that happens, right?

And not that it should fucking matter, but he was going about things “the right way,” which means he emigrated to the United States using CBP One with all the proper paperwork. (We should add that despite his formal status, Trumpworld insists that CBP One was cheating, so everyone who used it is “illegal.”) But Wilber missed a hearing notice because the absolute fucking dopes in the federal government did what the federal government has been doing to people this entire time and sent it to the wrong address.

Please note that I am being charitable by calling them “dopes,” because the real explanation is, as usual, eugenics.

Garcés Pérez was working — again, legally, not that Trumpers recognize it — when they shot him. He was contributing to the national economy and being an honest person, he was trying his best and going about things the right way, and now he’s partially paralyzed in a detention center with a bullet lodged in his back because … why? Because someone wanted to shoot somebody that day.

USA-Born Guy Arrested Three Times Despite Having His REAL ID, Which Is Just Absolute Bullshit

Out in Alabama, where the cops are apparently even dumber and worse than they are in Texas, somehow, a man named Leo Garcia Venegas keeps getting arrested for being undocumented. Only there’s a catch! He isn’t undocumented! He’s a born-and-bred American citizen! But it doesn’t matter anymore — they can apparently just tell you that your REAL ID is “fake” before arresting you!

Well guess what, I am now not going to bother waiting in line at the DMV to get that shitty invasive ID update, because what’s the fucking point if some anus-faced creep can just laugh and tell you it’s fake?

Anyway, law enforcement out in Alabama has detained him THREE TIMES in the last year and a half! These losers were raiding private construction sites, where Americans — some of whom might have been undocumented — were doing an honest day’s work, and the cops decided to just go ahead and beat the shit out of them and arrest them anyway.

The Institute for Justice has taken up Garcia Venegas’s lawsuit against DHS, and this week, a judge ordered immigration officers to stop warrantless raids at construction sites and to stop harassing people who have already shown them proof of citizenship, instead of following them home like creepy stalkers to try to confront them further like immigration agents did to this poor guy!

If you’re arresting people for not being citizens, even though not being a citizen is not a crime, and they’re citizens anyway, doesn’t that mean immigration isn’t your actual focus? Haha, rhetorical question, we all know what ICE is by now!

This is all being done with our public funding, our tax dollars, money that could be used to, idk, feed hungry people, or subsidize high gas prices, or help small businesses, but instead it is all getting poured into supporting white nationalist bullshit like this.

Rant

But you’d never know it from most of the national coverage these days. Feels like the new crop of mainstream journalists covering immigration doesn’t do shit except for normalize these hideous actions. It’s all just a fucking concept on a map to them, instead of the way so many of us are forced to live, and then the “objectivity” nonsense just helps them sanitize the racism of it all, which is what it was created to do.

Now it’s just all like “hArDLiNe iMmIgRaTioN pOLicIeS please don’t send the TikTok dipshits after us, Bad Daddy Trump” which is pretty much this administration’s stated goal, remember? To get everyone to start changing the language they use to describe this behavior, in an attempt to normalize it? That was what “RESIST!” was originally about, REMEMBER? Fun fact: Did you know that journalism’s role in a democracy is to call out and spotlight its ills, such as fascism, before they become systemic, not to normalize fascistic behavior?

Way to fall down on the job, you fucking asshole losers. You absolute worthless dipshits. I was right about all of you all along.

Back in the day, before I turned to debunking and became too much of my unhinged true self to talk to normal people anymore, I was a border reporter who covered immigration policy and I made certain to call things exactly what they were. I got into a lot of trouble for it at the time too, in at least two countries! I got death threats, and creepy texts and phone calls, and people following me around, and driving by my house, and all sorts of shit, simply for saying what I saw out on the field. It was exhausting, and often terrifying, and sometimes I would question whether there was a point to it all.

But I always felt, and still feel to the marrow of my bones something that these normalizing fucks will never understand: The truth is always worth it.

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Yesterday at the United Nations, when Donald Trump had his little temper tantrum at Kaitlan Collins’s face for daring to stand in his presence, she was asking about his forever-lost war against Iran. Specifically, she was asking about a new CNN/SSRS poll that shows that 64 percent of Americans don’t think he’s winning, and three-quarters don’t think he has a plan.

Biiiig meltdown! Trump also mused in front of the United Nations yesterday about whether to “annihilate” Iran and “drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.” That was after he whined in an early-morning meltdown yesterday about “cowards and traitors” who say Secretary Shitfaced has blown his wad early, to the point that we are now “low on munitions.”

So yeah, the baby is vewwy angwy.

So it can’t be pleasing him that this week is the week Republicans running for office have suddenly decided to start yelling about how he needs to end his damned war right now. Haha, good luck with that.

In Michigan, Mike Rogers is suddenly very insistent in a new video that “The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly.” He added, “Michigan families can’t afford to wait.” He proposes applying as a Band-Aid a temporary embargo on diesel exports that experts have already said probably wouldn’t work.

This is funny because Rogers is a super Iran hawk who loves bombing places like Iran, and everybody knows he only saying this because he is lying and desperate and losing to Abdul El-Sayed.

Meanwhile, Ashley Hinson, the Republican running for Senate in Iowa, suddenly also changed her tune Monday, posting on Twitter that Iowans “shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran.” She wants to suspend the gas tax, as does Rogers, and put that embargo on diesel and more.

Hinson’s Democratic opponent Josh Turek welcomed her to the party, while noting that she’s voted for this damned war seven times. “Glad you’re finally following my lead after waffling on the proposals I put forward last week to address the rising costs of the war in Iran,” he added.

Could any of this be related to how, for example, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball just moved the Michigan Senate race from “toss-up” to “leans Democratic,” and the Iowa race from “leans Republican” to “toss-up”?

Or that a new Marist poll has Turek up eight points in that race, which is, again, in Iowa? Notably that poll has Turek at the magic 50 percent mark.

(Sabato also moved the Kansas Senate race from “likely Republican” to “leans Republican,” plus a bunch more gubernatorial and congressional races that moved toward Democrats. We still got weeks to go before the election. Kansas can do it, y’all.)

Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted has also suddenly shown up on this issue, saying that “The war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices.” He has been losing to Sherrod Brown, and very likely will continue to.

Indeed, Punchbowl reported this morning that Republicans are “hit[ting] the panic button.” There’s a war powers resolution in the Senate this week, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune says, “I would hope that the team could hang together on this,” which doesn’t sound all that confident. Meanwhile, outgoing Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina says these Republicans need to say whatever they need to say to win their elections. Watch to see what Alaska Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, currently at great risk of losing to Mary Peltola, does on that vote.

Punchbowl adds a few more:

Rep. John James, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, also said on Tuesday that the war needs to end “quickly.”

Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), who is running for governor, said “we should be exiting Iran … it’s time to move on … Time to come home, take care of business here in America.”

Oh boy, does no one have confidence in Donald Trump, outside of people who don’t actually need votes from human beings?

In other election forecasting news, Cook Political Report has moved the Georgia Senate race from “Lean Democrat” to “Likely Democrat,” they’ve moved South Carolina from “Solid Republican” to “Likely Republican,” and they have similarly shifted Kansas to “Lean Republican.”

Can’t wait until that one turns into a “toss-up.” At this rate, two weeks from now?

But don’t worry, Donald Trump is on it. He says his ballroom doesn’t need to adhere to any damn building safety codes because “I am the code” and his aides are thinking about putting his name on Ford’s Theatre.

That’ll get those wayward voters back onside.

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Last week, ProPublica published a report on how Umar Kremlev, a weird Russian oligarch/biker/boxer person who does not really even speak English, blew several hundred thousand dollars on a post-wedding party for Donald Trump Jr. and his new bride Bettina Anderson. You know, like you do for your casual acquaintances.

Admittedly, I thought this was one of those things that would be devastating for any other politician, but that would likely blow over once Donald Trump said it wasn’t a big deal and then went and did something even more disturbing himself. Because that’s usually how this works, right? Trump says something that’s obviously a big deal is not a big deal, then everyone around him parrots that and acts like anyone who continues to mention it or acts like it’s a big deal is being a ridiculous pedant, then he does something else and it’s Groundhog’s Day all over again.

That has not really happened with this one. Yes, Trump has said it’s not a big deal and even claimed that Don Jr. told him he was going to pay the dude back for the festivities (sure, maybe in political favors). Don and the latest Mrs. Trump even announced on Instagram that it, like, totally was not a big deal because they didn’t even originally plan to get married that weekend, they just had other stuff to do on the island. Two of those things just happened to be parties being thrown, for their wedding, in their honor, by their good pal Umar. Duh.

“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding,” they said, as if that wasn’t exactly what ProPublica had reported. “It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.”

To be fair, it’s probably easier to be friends with Don Jr. if you can’t understand a word he is saying. Maybe it’s a Little Mermaid kind of thing where they can’t talk to one another but communicate through a primal connection and body language?

Surprisingly enough, not only has this not blown over, even as Trump has done 87 weird things since, including trying to ban the free press from the White House, but even a few Republicans have started questioning the wisdom of the son of the president letting a Putin-connected Russian oligarch throw him a few obscenely expensive post-wedding parties.

Republican Senator John Curtis (R-Utah) called on the Senate Judiciary Committee this week to investigate Junior’s ties to the Russian oligarch, as well as some of his other sketchy dealings.

He wrote:

[Q]uestions have arisen about the relationships of President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with foreign business figures and the acceptance of significant gifts. These include a lavish wedding afterparty, on a private island, provided by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who reportedly traveled to China as part of a delegation accompanying Vladimir Putin shortly before giving the gift.

These concerns are compounded by Donald Trump Jr.’s active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting.’ This pattern extends to his significant financial and advisory ties to prediction-market platforms® that depend on favorable federal regulatory decisions being considered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

In the tweet in which he shared the letter, he also wrote that “Republicans nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships. We should not unplug it now.”

Oh, you sweet summer Mormon.

But Curtis isn’t the only one. Now Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis have joined Curtis’s call. Those two men are on their way out, granted, but that makes three.

Also not so into this whole Russian oligarch sugar daddy thing? Ben Shapiro. Though I suspect that perhaps has more to do with him trying to find his footing in this brave new world in which his whole empire is imploding and livestreaming himself playing Fortnite for the first time just isn’t doing it for anyone. (No, that’s real, that happened.)

In response to the news, he said:

Okay. I have a lot of good friends. I’m not sure how many of those good friends are going to drop, you know, four hundred, five hundred thousand dollars for an elaborate post-wedding party. And also, I will admit, I do not have a lot of good friends with whom I cannot converse because they don’t speak my language. Right? Umar apparently speaks mostly Russian, and also, again, happens to be very, very close with Vladimir Putin.

So again, suspicion of corruption here is not totally unavailing. It’s not unwarranted. If you change the -- here’s my rule. If you change the name Donald Trump Jr. to Hunter Biden, would Republicans be screaming bloody murder about it? If the answer is yes, it is a bad thing. It is a not good thing.

He then went on to also criticize some of Junior’s other shady dealings.

Now again, none of this means that President Trump is the pro in any quid pro quo. Like Don Jr. is receiving a wedding gift, and therefore President Trump does something. But Don Jr., with this sort of stuff, does his dad a disservice. Just as it is a major disservice to his father's administration and to the Republican Party generally and to the country for World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm and its shaky assets, to be taking in hundreds of millions of dollars for what appears to be vaporware. It's not a service to the administration or to the American people when 1789 Capital, which is a firm in which he is invested, is getting government contracts with companies in which it is invested. Or tungsten mining in Kazakhstan, or rare earth companies in Brazil.

With Trump’s polling in the gutter and several of his compatriots jumping off the Trump Train, he may have also clocked that unquestioning loyalty and simping for Trump and his family may no longer be the way to go.

Media Matters also clocked that someone who called into the Megyn Kelly Wrap-Up Show — which is, very weirdly, a show on Sirius XM in which former Federalist culture editor and current Breaking Points cohost Emily Jashinsky recaps Megyn Kelly’s show that day and takes calls — was wondering why Kelly didn’t cover this story. Kelly, in case you were not aware, is currently on Trump’s shitlist, along with Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and other former diehards. It’s not clear what Jashinsky’s deal is.

“I don't know. It seems weird that there's just — the silence is deafening. If Bill Clinton would have done this, I would have been outraged,” said a caller named George in Cleveland. “And we hear nothing.”

Now, this is weird. Because while Jashinsky admitted that corruption isn’t good, she also noted that it probably doesn’t matter to most Trump voters.

It looks like a clear conflict of interest. The entire Trump organization, from my perspective, is being run as a conflict of interest. You know, they have — they’re building resort in the UAE right now, the Trump organization, where you have Trump’s two sons. Donald Trump Jr. is on the boards — or is an adviser, I should say, to Polymarket and Kalshi as this administration is overseeing whether or not they should be regulated and how they should be regulated.

I mean, all of these are kind of glaring conflicts of interest. I think a lot of people heard when Trump said, “I know the system, I alone can fix it” in 2015/16. They said, “Yeah, these conflicts of interest might exist. They’re much less of a priority to me than fixing the country, and I’m sure a lot of you feel that way. I’m curious.”

Imagine hearing Trump say that and thinking it was not a completely batshit thing for a human being to say. Also it being 2026 and still believing that he was correct in that. What a world!

That being said, she’s probably right about that. I would argue that a lot of Trump supporters get a kick out of the corruption. I’ve seen a lot of folks on the MAGA-leaning message boards really kind of cheer for this sort of thing, more or less saying they love the Trumps and are thrilled for them to get whatever they can out of this presidency. Whatever makes them happy or brightens their day, you know? That’s the most important thing.

Quite frankly, the fact that any of them are getting it together to care about this, and the fact that the story is still in the news a full week later is fairly impressive.

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Meanwhile, Trump has been treating his namesake like a common Tiffany as of late, not even bothering to go to the wedding himself. I’d say maybe he knew about the Umar of it all in advance and wanted to avoid the appearance of corruption, but he probably cares even less about that than he does about his non-Ivanka children.

Who knows how long this will last, or if there is a possibility Trumpists could care even a tenth as much about this very real corruption as they have about, say, the insider trading they have, without evidence, spent years insisting Elizabeth Warren was involved in, despite the fact that she sponsors or cosponsors basically every bill banning the practice, probably to throw them off her scent! Or all of the pizza Satanism they think Hillary Clinton was involved with. Or all of Tom Hanks’s imaginary sex slaves. I don’t think there is.

However, I do think the fact that any of them feel remotely comfortable speculating that there may be something hinky about this is a sign that things aren’t going as well for Trump as he might believe.

[Twitter / Media Matters / Media Matters]

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

After Donald Trump announced that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico would no longer be allowed to cover anything at the White House, because they report facts Trump doesn’t like, something truly surprising happened. Other media outlets announced that, in solidarity, they would no longer participate in the White House press pool. With CNN excluded from the White House TV pool, the other four participating pool networks — CBS News, ABC News, NBC News, and even Fucking Fox News — announced they would no longer provide live video of White House events.

Everybody Out Of The Pool

The effect was immediate, because without the pool cameras and microphones, the rest of the media had no source for live audio, as Newsmax hilariously acknowledged Monday while covering Trump’s ribbon-cutting ceremony for his beautiful new helipad, the best helipad ever built. Trump was talking, but couldn’t be heard.

In fact, not even the White House YouTube channel was prepared for losing the network cameras and audio, so its video also missed whatever Dear Leader said. We know a lot of you don’t watch videos of Trump because you can’t stand that man’s voice, but go ahead and click this: all you’ll hear is Marine One’s engines idling loudly in the background. (Video cued to the ribbon-cutting moment.)

Also hilarious: The AI-generated transcript of the nearly 10-minute video looks like this.

This is absolutely the best way to watch Trump. Maybe something similar can be arranged for all his TV appearances. How about some of you computer geniuses create an app that dubs in Marine One noise over anything Trump says in a video?

Not State TV, Just Stale TV

Not to worry, though! The White House announced Monday the creation of an all-new alternative to the Fake News: something it called “Trump TV,” which would be so exciting that everyone in the nation would surely watch. To make the point, the White House rushed out a teaser trailer featuring clips — apparently used without permission of the copyright holders — showing various TV and movie characters rushing to watch!

Holy crap, was this going to be the fulfilment of Roger Ailes’s dream, back during the Nixon administration, of a state TV news channel controlled by the White House, a 24/7 source of friendly propaganda like you’d see in North Korea? California Gov. Gavin Newsom warned that it sounded like “truly autocratic behavior” and fretted it would be “quite literally state-run TV. ” But he said that before the new YouTube channel, “Trump TV Essentials,” actually came online Monday evening.

Newsom forgot, as did others who worried this would be a live feed of pro-Trump reports and talking points about the day’s news, that everyone in the Trump administration is a fucking lazy grifter with the work ethic of a failed Delta House pledge.

Instead of pro-Trump news programming, the new YouTube channel, apparently thrown together in hours, is nothing more than an automated stream of old content — Trump speeches, press events, signing ceremonies and appearances with foreign leaders — that’s already been posted to the White House YouTube channel. No anchors, no schedule, no ability to search or “rewind,” and not even the option to turn on automated closed captioning, we guess because deaf people are DEI.

Apart from the robo-filled titles of the YouTube clips — “President Trump Participates in a Rose Garden Club Dinner with American Farmers” or “President Trump Participates in a Trilateral Signing Event” — the stream doesn’t offer even a hint of context about when the video was originally taken or what it’s about. You might happen upon a ten-minute presser with the Japanese prime minister, or one of Trump’s two-hour rambles at some White House event from months ago, whatever its news value was at the time.

“Trump TV” doesn’t even carry new Trump events live. While Trump spoke at the United Nations Tuesday morning, “Trump TV Essentials” was showing Trump’s speech to the 2026 white House prayer breakfast back in February. The UN speech eventually showed up — hours after it happened — so at least the feed is set up to replay newish uploads, but you have no idea what will be on at any given moment.

It’s a complete failure, even as propaganda. Like a Trump speech, there’s not a pretense of coherence. So far, the White House YouTube channel hasn’t even added a permalink to the new mess. (If you click “videos” you can find the trailer we embedded above, but not the actual “TrumpTV Essentials” stream.)

Predictably and hilariously, Trumphumpers on social media proclaimed Trump TV an instant success, an unedited, direct-to-voters alternative to the fake news so you won’t even have to watch Fox anymore! Skip the MSM filters and lies, and bring down the media oligarchs! Or see a July speech by JD Vance that nobody watched at the time. To really get the full experience, the influencers tell followers to download the spyware-filled White House app, too.

It’s certainly possible that “Trump TV” might become a full-time propaganda outlet, but its viewership quickly fell right after it went live, from around 8,000 viewers at launch (a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore) to fewer than 4,000 viewers after just 90 minutes. As we wrapped this story up Tuesday afternoon, only about 1,250 people were watching Trump’s August announcement of how healthcare is affordable for everyone, although affordability is a hoax.

Trump Needed To Be On TV, So He Visited Zohran Mamdani

By Monday afternoon, Trump had to decamp to New York City to get his face on camera in advance of his UN appearance, and even then he needed to rely on a joint presser with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who people actually like seeing on TV. He bragged that he had beaten the boycott that he had himself provoked, because he’s just too smart for the liberal media. “They said they’re going to boycott me, but they never boycott me, so I wasn’t very worried about that, he bloviated as he visibly shrank in size. “Look at all that press,” he squeaked. The New York Times (gift link) pointed out that CNN didn’t have a crew at the joint appearance, relying instead on a local feed from Spectrum 1.

Mamdani was all too happy to tell reporters that unlike some people, his administration welcomes coverage from all members of the media.

Trump just wants to be on TV, and if he has to get there by riding the coattails of s genuinely popular mayor, he doesn’t mind.

The whole affair made Trumpy lunatic Laura Loomer very very sad and frustrated, the poor dear. In a dozen or so posts on at the Bad Social Media Network, Loomer frothed about communists and jihadists sapping Trump’s precious bodily fluids or something, and how Trump had totally betrayed loyal fluffers like her. She said she’s still going for Republicans, to save America from communism, but pouted that “We should be working to remove the communists, not breaking bread with them.” And she just kept going.

Loomer also threw up her hands at one point and wailed that all was probably lost, but that Americans would just have to learn the hard way why they should have stopped Islam and communism before the two (diametrically opposed) ideologies take over. You’ll see! You’ll see! If only from President Mamdani’s prison camps!

Well of course Mamdani might become president after Democrats have their way with America. After all, she noted, Barack HUSSEIN Obama had already become president, so don’t think Mamdani, another “Muslim from Africa,” can’t take the office.

As things stand now, of course CNN, Politico and MS NOW have filed a whopping lawsuit against Trump’s press ban. In a beclowned response last night, Trump’s yapping pomeranian at the Department of Justice filed a response, explaining that they needed to ban those outlets because NATIONAL SECURITY! just like his ballroom and his arch, because everything with fascists and tyrants is NATIONAL SECURITY!

Also Trump had a tantrum at the United Nations in response to the presence of CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that you simply must watch:

“You should not be here!” he whined. “You should not be here covering me.”

“You said you weren’t going to cover me, you shouldn’t be covering me.”

Collins calmly explained that they were credentialed by the UN, and continued to ask her question about how the American people think Trump is losing his Iran war. Sbe noted in the report additionally that CNN never said they weren’t going to cover him.

That is of course now evidence in the lawsuit the news orgs filed.

Trump also had a late-night tantrum at Collins on Truth Social, who he says has a “TRUMP” addiction.

He’s not mad. Don’t write in the newspaper that he’s mad.

[NYT (gift link) / Guardian / Daily Beast]

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Nobody Wants Your Trump TV

Good morning, bad tabs first, good tabs to cheer you up at the end like!

Who doesn’t go to the UN to threaten “annihilation”? (Washington Sun)

Fifteen thousand people — perhaps immigrants but who knows! — have been disappeared from ICE’s online database so their families and lawyers can’t find them. And oh, this too:

A federal judge ruled Monday that the Department of Homeland (sic) Security (DHS) has to stop arresting Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S. citizen with a REAL ID who’s been arrested three times for not seeming like a U.S. citizen with a REAL ID. (h/t)

Plus they’re still shooting people again, some more. (The Fucking News)

Meanwhile, this Maryland sheriff has been terrorizing immigrants forever. (Bolts)

Everything about the Trump administration throwing 750,000 people off Obamacare for “fraud” (with maybe another 440,000 still to come) is shocking, but my favorite is the 200 Obamacare brokers who had been barred from the program by Biden for faking enrollments … and who were recertified by Trump last year so they could do it all over again. (Gift link New York Times)

This is just very good evidence of “fraud.”

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Susan Collins been a bad bad girl. (Pro Publica)

This is a fun “behind the music” of how Pro Publica found out about the oligarch who bought Don Jr. and his bride their private island wedding weekend! (Pro Publica)

I know Evan gave you the underlying NYT story on Monday, but you did go and look at the gold reliefs they put in the Kennedy Center in place of the art, right? (Lawyers Guns & Money)

LOL Bill Pulte tried to get “mortgage fraud” on (acting) Attorney General Todd Blanche too. (Talking Points Memo)

All the female Marines (or at least more than 9 in 10) are passing the harder “sex neutral” fitness tests, so Pete Hegseth is going to have to find a different reason to fire them :( (Daily Kos)

Throwing our trans friends under the bus isn’t going to win you any elections, and standing up for them isn’t going to lose you any. So try doing the right thing! (String in a Maze)

This unborn baby didn’t have a skull or a brain and the mother still had to leave Tennessee for an abortion. (WBIR)

The Chad Mamdani didn’t just make DoorDash settle $131.5 million on the workers they shortchanged — he also made them apologize. (DoorDash)

Ohhhh those Michigan Jewish Democrats for Mike Rogers do this every election going back to Mitt Romney? Ohhhhh. (Dropsite News) Byron Donalds all “Trump who?” lol :) (Gift link Miami Herald) Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas and maybe just a teeny bit Florida. (Kansas Reflector)

Who wants to read an interview with AOC on running for Senate or president? All of us? YAY! (Gift link New York Times)

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You guys.

You guys.

I love bad movies, okay? I grew up watching MST3K. I watch terrible Lifetime movies on the regular. I can sit through all kinds of schlock. I mean, I’ve seen literally every movie in the entire Bring it On franchise, and there are way more of those than you think there are (it was an especially lazy sick day). So when I tell you that the Daily Wire’s Run Hide Fight: Infidels was one of the most torturous things I’ve ever sat through? It really means something. I don’t even know why I did it, because it cost me $15 and there are at least five other “I watched it so you don’t have to” things out there by now, but I guess I was curious about how terrible it could possibly be.

And the answer is: really, really, really terrible. Not even just politically (though it is deeply stupid politically), but there are so many plot holes, so many poorly explained characters, so many things that just make no sense whatsoever, so many very awkward attempts at iconic one-liners … to the point where I almost felt bad for everyone involved in the making of this garbage fire. Because there really is something tragic about the fact that so many of these Daily Wire losers are people who have convinced themselves that the only reason they didn’t make it big in Hollywood is that Hollywood is too liberal, that they’ve spent so long complaining about how what actually does get produced is bad because it’s forced to be “woke,” and they had the chance to show us all what we’ve been missing and then failed this epically.

I mean, it wasn’t exactly a surprise given what they’ve put out before, but still. It was so, so fucking bad.

The movie starts out with Jonathan Majors and this other guy who turns out to be the father of the main character, and they’re in Mogadishu about to bring in a “prime target” so he can stand trial in the United States — because I guess they’re pretending that’s how we do things. Boy will they be surprised when they find out about Gitmo! So they walk into this home, kill a bunch of people, and then the non-Jonathan Majors guy tries to talk to a little kid and be nice to him, at which point he gets shot by some other guy they didn’t kill.

I tell you this, not because I plan on giving some shot-by-shot replay of the movie, but because that is the whole premise in a nutshell. Empathy, particularly for Muslim people, is foolish and will get you killed.

Anyway, this guy’s kid ends up going to school at an especially woke university where students are currently encamped in the middle of the quad to protest the United States’ support of Israel’s attack on Gaza. Naturally, they are led by an especially clueless, pretentious, and obnoxious blue-haired woke lib girl. You know, because they are always so het up about blue hair for some reason. There’s a bit of a conflict though, because the school is supposed to put on its annual carnival and for some reason can’t do that anywhere else on their very expansive grounds. Most of the staff and school board is on the side of the student activists, except for a pregnant professor who is like “But the quad is for everyone! Why shouldn’t everyone get to enjoy it? Tell them they have 72 hours to pack it up!” and then everyone is mean to her.

Pregnant professor is probably one of the most glaring pointless side plots in the movie and it appears that her main function is to be the unfair recipient of woke criticism and to give birth during the height of the “action” while hiding behind her desk.

Meanwhile, a school employee we are meant to see as a “typical HR lady” interviews and hires Ibrahim, a Muslim, as a janitor and is just a little too respectful of his background and religious beliefs, and a little too down on America (telling him, after he says that he loves America, that it’s not all its cracked up to be).

Ibrahim, however, is an ISIL-affiliated terrorist and also the son of the “prime target” that Jonathan Majors had brought in, and he is plotting to turn the school (and eventually the whole country) into a caliphate to “replace” the one destroyed by the US. He spends the whole first part of the movie sneaking around putting guns in the school’s many sewers and garbage cans, in preparation for the invasion. Uh oh! Just think of the lives that could have been saved if only that HR lady had been a little more Islamophobic.

Ibrahim is also, by the way, secretly working via text message with the blue-haired feminist lady, who thinks he’s just a nice Palestinian man who wants peace or whatever.

At this point, you’re probably wondering “What about the main characters, though?” Well, honestly, they’re not really doing too much at this point. The main-main character, I guess, is Devlin, the son of the guy who got killed with Jonathan Majors, and he is mostly busy trying to get with this gal Lizzy, by doing this crazy old-fashioned thing called “walking up and talking to her” despite being warned by his friend that you’re not supposed to do that anymore. His roommate PJ is a weird, video-game obsessed, valor-stealing douchebag we later learn only pretended to serve overseas but was never actually deployed. He spends a lot of time harassing the activist students in hopes of impressing Avery, a future Fox News blonde and “reporter” for … something? I don’t really know. Probably Project Veritas.

Naturally, he is one of the heroes of this joint.

Aaaaaaaaanyway, Jonathan Majors comes to the school to give a talk, and Devlin and his crush are both in the audience (he was on the VIP list!) even though it seems like he’s supposed to be mad at him because he thinks he got his dad killed. Majors starts talking about how “there are three ways Islam will conquer the West: through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our nation's freedoms against us.”

And that is the moment at which the terrorists decide to strike, coming up from the sewers and whatnot, armed to the teeth and ready to kill. At some point after some major killing, Ibrahim meets the student activists on the rooftop for the scene you have probably actually seen a bunch at this point, as they seem to think it is really quite clever. The blue-haired girl activist is like “I didn’t realize there’d be so much killing” and Ibrahim is like, “No, this is the exact right amount of killing” and starts weirdly talking about how people in the US aren’t even having babies, in order to drive home the current pet concern of the American Right, but tells them they’ll be able to tell the children about this glorious day. So blue-haired activist girl tells him they’re not going to have kids because she’s pansexual and her guy friend says “And I’m gay,” at which point Ibrahim kicks him off the roof. You know, because the Right loves that “Sure, we hate gay people and don’t want them to have rights, but in some Islamic countries they throw them off of rooftops!” thing, like they don’t realize that they’re basically saying “We’re a moderate version of the terrible people we just told you about!”

Oh. There is also a Black security guard named Terrance who “stands up” to the activists while doing his job telling them to get out so they can set up the carnival and gets called an Uncle Tom by a white woman, tells a little girl who lost her dad (because there are children at this university carnival? It’s very confusing!) “I’m still looking for mine,” and shares PJ’s confusion over commercials featuring interracial couples. His function in this film is to demonstrate that the activists are the real racists who don’t care about working people and that cool Black people are totally fine with blatant right-wing racism. There’s also a Korean character who shares a similar function. Towards the end of the movie, he uses a computer to disarm a bomb and when asked how he did that, responds “I’m Asian.”

It’s an Asian thing! When they’re kids, they go to their piano lessons and chess club and then afterwards go to their bomb disarming classes.

Oh! And there’s a random Nazi who is on the side of the terrorists. Like he’s a white blonde German with a swastika tattoo who … is Muslim now? I guess? Because he hates Jewish people? There seriously are just way too many characters in this film.

Anyway, the main character crew — Devlin, PJ, and Terrance — decide to take up arms against the terrorists while the government stands around the perimeter of the college doing nothing. At this point, they decide they’ve done enough random mass murder for the time being and start in on building their caliphate by, uh, forcing the women to shower in order to cleanse them of their evil Western sins so they can be the brides of the Caliph (who will be Ibrahim’s father) and all of the other terrorists, and making everyone record a bunch of statements in front of an Islamic State flag about how they’ve accepted Allah as their one true god and what have you.

Oh, except for a trans student, who they kill and tie to the flagpole with the Progress Pride flag.

While this is going on, the main characters bust in and free some of the people who were all being lined up to make their video statements/become war brides, but what’s confusing is that all of the girls are wearing their normal clothes at this point, but then are suddenly wearing burkas when they escape. Does not seem to be the optimal time for a costume change, but ymmv.

This is also when that lady gives birth. Remember her? I barely did! She nearly gets attacked by one of the terrorists while trying to cut her own umbilical cord but is saved by Terrance, and that is the end of her part in this movie.

So, at this point a bunch of people run to the police outside the school, including Devlin and PJ — who are initially mistaken for a terrorists and tased in probably the only funny-ish scene in the whole movie. But there are still people inside, including their love interests, and the police/FBI won’t do anything about it, not even FBI Deputy Chief Kristy Swanson, and she used to be Buffy. So they team up with Jonathan Majors (who left earlier after he was shot but is apparently better now) to rescue them. They do all the rescuing, and then eventually Majors finds the Caliph/bad guy he didn’t kill before when he had the chance and pulls his gun out. The bad guy is like “Ha! That is not the American way! The American way is task forces and climate change and abortion!” (I did not make that up, he literally said that) and then Jonathan Majors shoots him and is all like “No, that’s the American way.”

Finally, Devlin rescues his lady love on the carousel, and PJ gets shot while trying to rescue his lady, but it only hits him in the bulletproof vest, and I guess after that everything is fine? Because then they all kiss and, swear to God … “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” starts playing. Like the song, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Like, hundreds of people are dead but they’re having a romantic carnival moment to a one-hit wonder from 1993 that has nothing to do with anything at all.

There’s a lot more. Like, there are so many weird details thrown in that make absolutely no sense — like that Lizzy’s dad is a tech billionaire but no one knows it, except somehow the terrorists find out and … make her address him directly in her video? But she refuses! There are also some very weird and old-timey lines, like when some girl throws her drink in PJ’s face and he’s like “Ugh! Right in the peepers!”

The peepers!

You know, I realize that Ben Shapiro didn’t write this himself, but if your whole villain origin story is getting rejected from Hollywood, wouldn’t you at least try to put something out that is less objectively crappy?

He’s trying to pretend now that he’s not hurt by the reaction to the film, claiming that the “haters” who don’t understand that “it’s an action movie” are making it a hit, except it’s not even bad in a cult classic, The Room kind of way. It’s just bad.

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Shapiro spends a lot of time complaining about how “woke” movies are trying to hit people over the head with political posturing, but no “woke” movie or TV show on earth has ever been this overt.

What we’re supposed to be seeing here is the grand irony of all the dumb “woke” students finding out that the people they’re defending actually hate them. This has been a thing on the Right forever, this “Oh, sure, you hate us because we hate gay people and feminism and want to establish a theocracy, but you don’t like it when we bomb or even just generally oppress legions of Muslim people, many of whom hate gay people and feminism and love theocracy even more than we do?” thing. And I’ve always thought that this, on some level, kind of hurts their feelings.

For me, this is not hard. I would be opposed to anyone being treated that way, regardless of what they believe about me or those I care about, because that’s not the point. I don’t want to bomb anyone! If the United States government were to decide “Hey, we’re gonna go bomb the Daily Wire,” I would be opposed to that.

The real irony is, frankly, that the “bad guys” here actually share the views of many Daily Wire hosts. Ben Shapiro might not kick a gay guy off a rooftop, but he said he wouldn’t even go to his “friend” Dave Rubin’s house for his anniversary party because of how they are sinful and he can’t celebrate sin. Both Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles want the United States to be a Christian theocracy. They’re all mad at women having rights, they’re all mad at LGBTQ+ people for existing and having rights, and, given their support of ICE, it’s clear that they’re not afraid of violence being used to get what they want.

Indeed, in one of the very few scenes Jonathan Majors is actually in, he describes the Muslim evildoers as being opposed to the separation of church and state and women’s rights, two things the Daily Wire is not known to be fond of, either.

It would be incredible if any of them could take a moment and consider that the “bad guys” are just doing a more extreme and more violent version of what they want to do, but the fact is, if any of them had that much self-awareness, they never would have released this “film” in the first place.

OPEN THREAD.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Generally speaking, the Right doesn’t tend to care too much about the environment. After all, it would just be rude to suggest that God would even make a planet that we could harm or that he’s not coming to vacuum them all into heaven and destroy the world any day now. As Ann Coulter once said, ever so elegantly, “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.’”

Plus there’s a lot of money in not giving a fuck about it.

And yet, they have recently found one environmental concern they can get behind — abortion water! Yes, by sheer coincidence, having nothing at all to do with their personal desire to force women to have babies against their will, America’s most fervent anti-abortion-rights advocates are very concerned about what abortion pills are doing to the soil our drinking water.

Either that or they think it’s one way to get the pill banned or even to get people who don’t think the government should get involved in people’s personal reproductive choices to join their side of things.

Just a few months ago, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin (what a weird sentence fragment to type) denied to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) having any interest or knowledge about the EPA planning to investigate the effects of mifepristone and misoprostol in the water.

However! The EPA recently announced its plan for a “cutting edge scientific study” to test America’s drinking water for over 1000 possible contaminants from pharmaceuticals, pesticides and more — including mifepristone, misoprostol, and hormones from birth control.

“It is exciting after a very long journey that’s been almost 10 years, to have this be taken seriously enough to be on an official list,” Kristi Hamrick, head of policy at Students for Life of America (SFLA), said, according to The Hill. “But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a lot of information that we need, for it to be useful for people to know.”

Basically, their “theory” is that when people who take the pills go to the bathroom afterwards, traces of the medication gets into our water supply and affect the fertility of those who drink it. Except that is not at all how anything works. The human body metabolizes the drugs to the point where any amount that would be excreted into the water would be entirely negligible and have no effect on anything whatsoever. An EPA study (from back when it was run by normal people) found that it would take “months to decades” of a person drinking two liters of raw, untreated sewage a day to get anything close to an actual dose of any of the most commonly prescribed drugs.

The EPA’s test, notably, will not get into whether or not these trace contaminants are in any way harmful to people, just whether or not they are in the water to begin with, which is not actually all that helpful. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, there is “no evidence that medication abortion is affecting U.S. water systems, including drinking water and aquatic wildlife.”

But they’re going for it anyway! Why? Because they want to ban abortion medication.

From The Hill:

“This is kind of end-running the whole Safe Drinking Water Act required monitoring program, and going directly to an unprecedented fishing expedition,” said Betsy Southerland, a former career scientist in EPA’s Office of Water who left during the first Trump administration.

“I don’t think in any stretch of the imagination [EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin] is planning for this 10-year process to take place to put a drinking water standard out for mifepristone. I think he’s planning to use the immediate results to try to get FDA [Food and Drug Administration] to take it off the market,” Southerland said.

The test, conveniently, would also allow the government agency a peek into abortion pill usage in areas where abortion is currently banned, fueling the fire for those who want to ban telehealth abortions that allow women in those states to get the pill through the mail.

One of the major voices pushing this nonsense has been conservative influencer Isabel Brown. Back in May, Brown asked her Instagram audience, “What if I were to tell you that every time you fill up a glass of water at your kitchen sink from the tap, you were actually *drinking* someone else’s abortion — both the pills that started the process, and the human remains that were flushed down the toilet?”

Well, she would pretty much be full of shit. Just like she would literally have to be in order to be able to be affected by abortion pills in tap water.

The point, of course, is to gross people out and scare them. I suppose, in the same vein, she could suggest that we are all drinking fecal matter and menstrual fluid and Viagra and “human remains” from natural miscarriages, but she’s not doing that. She’s not worried about data centers using up all of our water. She’s not worried about any other form of pollution or any other environmental concerns. Indeed, in the very interview she posted to Instagram, she posits it as a way to attack abortion medication, directly telling Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life that “one of the other major policy areas I think we could make a dramatic change tomorrow in the distribution of abortion pills is in how it’s impacting our water.”

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There are actually a number of environmental contaminants that we know affect fertility, that we know can result in higher miscarriage rates. PFAS plastics (“forever chemicals”) have been shown to “harm fertility, raise preeclampsia risk, and increase preterm birth.” Air pollution has been found to cause “men to experience relentlessly decreasing sperm count and function while women are suffering progressively worse anovulation, impaired implantation, and loss of fetal viability.” Climate change, which we know they don’t believe in, has been found to be a likely cause of reduced fertility.

Are they worried about any of those things? They are not. Because dealing with any of those issues, apart from being an affront to Ann Coulter’s God, will do nothing to further their agenda of making abortion illegal. Sort of like how they don’t give a shit about babies once they are born. They are, however, also concerned about the effects of birth control on the water, because they don’t want women taking birth control, either — or turning the frogs gay.

The bad act is not polluting the water, it is having sex for reasons other than procreation and then refusing to accept the “consequences.” God is out here trying to correctively punish sexually active women with pregnancies, so that their ruined lives can be a message to all other women out there who might want to have sex for non-procreative reasons.

The fact that our tax money is going towards providing these idiots with PR material and validation is positively absurd. The idea of “testing” the water for these things without also determining if they are actually harmful in any way is pointless. The fact is, if there were a way to purify the water to the point where none of these chemicals could be traced, it would not matter to these people or their cause — which is not keeping our water clean, but leveraging other people’s desire for clean water to their own ends.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

There was a gut punch of an essay that rolled across my timeline sometime in the early part of the first Trump administration, when I had fooled myself into thinking this was all a phase, a blip.

Written by a political scientist with expertise in the rise and fall of empires, the essay, as far as I can remember, said this: In the final stages of a dying empire, the people and their ruling class swing wildly between political poles, desperate for anyone who can steady their sinking ship, until they land on the guy who refuses to give up his power and leads the empire to total ruin. The end.

I recall finishing the essay, closing my laptop, and thinking: Well, shit.

I would link you to that essay if I could find it. Alas, I can’t. Maybe, like everything else on the modern internet, it was purged because the site on which it lived was purchased by a venture capitalist who makes money by destroying valuable things. Anyway, I’ve thought about that essay of late — for agonizingly obvious reasons — and I’ve landed on the only real solution to stopping this terrible little lurching dance the American empire is doing on its way to collapse: Dissolve the Republican Party.

Any nation even remotely interested in maintaining a democratic republic can’t have one of its two major political parties embrace the sort of anti-constitutionalism that leads to all-out authoritarianism. It would be one thing if the Republican Party were one of four or six or 10 parties represented in Congress and in state legislatures. But it’s not. It’s one of two.

Our situation is terribly zero sum in nature: If the pro-democracy party doesn’t hold power, the anti-democracy party is in total control and gleefully ignores (most) constitutional limits on its power. This is the formula for collapse. It’s why you have low-simmering panic attacks in the lead-up to every election: The stakes could not be higher. A political party very open about its hatred for the country could take charge. And when they’re in charge, there are no rules.

The Republican Party cannot exist in its current form if the United States is going to have a sustained small-d democratic future. I don’t know what mechanisms would be necessary to dissolve this awful iteration of the GOP (other countries have so-called constitutional courts that make these decisions). I’m only certain of one thing: The fascist collaborators wielding unchecked power on the Supreme Court need to be neutralized via Court expansion and reform if anti-democracy elements are to be properly purged from the US.

It always, always, always starts with the Supreme Court, a captured institution by any measure.

Leaders in other democracies understand the unsustainable nature of such an arrangement. You can’t jump back and forth between incremental liberalism and blood-soaked fascism and expect to maintain a functional country. That’s why pro-democracy parties in Germany are pushing to ban the openly fascist party known as Alternative for Germany (AfD), which — like many modern fascist operations — has provided a 21st century makeover for the hideous ideology, if one can call it that. The AfD recently became the nation’s first fascist party to gain a state government majority with an assist from Elon Musk, the world’s foremost enemy of democracy.

German intelligence recently identified the AfD — rife with members who are open about their disdain for people of color, LGBTQ people, and, naturally, immigrants — as an extremist organization. The country’s intelligence agency, which can now legally monitor the AfD, released a 1,000-page report in May detailing the party’s radical stances and calls for violence. “Central to our assessment is the ethnically and ancestrally defined concept of the people that shapes the AfD, which devalues entire segments of the population in Germany and violates their human dignity,” the BfV domestic intelligence agency said in a statement. “This concept is reflected in the party’s overall anti-migrant and anti-Muslim stance,” it said, accusing the AfD of stirring up “irrational fears and hostility” toward marginalized people and groups.

It doesn’t come as a surprise then that Musk, the titular head of the international fascist movement when he’s not gooning to Grok-generated AI slop porn, has been an outspoken supporter of AfD, telling the party’s supporters to “move beyond” feeling guilt about the Holocaust. Musk has whined online about the prospect of his favorite fascist party being banned from German politics, calling it an attack on democracy, without a shred of irony.

German authorities can attempt to limit or ban public funding for AfD only if they can prove the “party is explicitly out to undermine or even overthrow German democracy,” according to Reuters. The case against the Republican Party for openly undermining democratic institutions in the US is open-and-shut. From limiting voting to promising to pay citizens to vote for their candidates to using the police to stop political opponents from casting a ballot to implementing egregious gerrymanders, Republicans check every box.

They are by any objective measure an authoritarian outlier in modern international politics, and they should be treated as such.

That mainstream media outlets have refused for close to two decades to cover the Republican Party as anything but a normal party in a normal democracy is baffling until you remember how important The Game has become to political journalism. Our politics is two evenly-matched teams in an eternal competition for power, not one exceedingly normal team versus a deeply radicalized insurgency that has dispensed with all rules of the game in its push for permanent victory. That framing — that lens — doesn’t lend itself to the horserace journalism that somehow, someway still defines American political coverage during our headlong plunge into fascist rule. So media outlets continue writing and talking about the Republican Party the way one would a normal, legitimate party in a high-functioning democratic republic.

It’s a failure without end, one that has created a tragically misinformed populace that has no idea what it’s voting for every two or four years.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Republicans know they have no place in a functional constitutional republic composed of parties that recognize democratic norms. Stephen Miller recently called for the Democratic Party to be labeled as a terrorist organization. I don’t believe Miller in his poisoned, blackened heart truly thinks Democrats are terrorists and that their party must be banned from national politics. Everything with these people is pure projection; Miller making this insane pronouncement only shows he understands how intolerable the modern GOP has become to small-d democrats.

The Republican Party could still exist in some form after its current iteration is dismantled. Perhaps more moderate elements of the party — as much as those exist today — could cobble together a coalition that would agree to abide by constitutional norms, stop ignoring judges’ rulings, and recognize free and fair elections as free and fair. I’m not going to be the nostalgic liberal who misremembers recent history and says the Republican Party used to be good. It was never good. It was always bad. But as recently as 2006 and 2008, there was no pushback to the results of elections in which they had their asses handed to them. There was bitter acceptance, and a renewed commitment to ratfucking American democracy into oblivion since the party could no longer compete on an even playing field.

So much as a mention of dissolving the anti-democracy Republican Party would of course spur the kind of backlash that might make January 6 look tame. A few Germans interviewed by The New York Times in the paper’s coverage of the push to banish the AfD said they loathed the party but were afraid of what their supporters would do if the AfD were booted from the country’s political environment. We would see the same kind of reaction in the US, and it’s exactly what opponents of democracy would want.

Giving into that threat, I think, would be a terrible mistake. It would only serve to validate the Right’s threats of violence — both implicit and explicit — and reinforce their approach to dominating American politics. They thrive on fear. It sustains them. Withholding your fear — and your despair — is what starves them and leaves them reeling. They have no other way of seeing the world and operating in it. They have no Plan B.

One German who backs the country’s fascist party told the Times that dissolving the anti-democracy organization would constitute a blow to German democracy, a flourish of bad faith that would surely seep into the American mainstream if we were ever to try to create a sustainable democracy and dissolve our own anti-democracy political party.

“In a democracy, you also have to be able to represent the opposition,” this AfD supporter told the Times. “We have 11 million people who voted for the party. Eleven million people who would simply be banned.”

That’s the thing: AfD supporters would in no way be banned from German politics. They could simply back a party that agrees to uphold the basic tenets of a workable democracy, or they could stay home on election day. There’s always a choice. One of those choices shouldn’t be the dissolving of democracy itself.

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Here’s a hilarious foreign policy failure story about Donald Trump, as he and other world leaders descend upon the United Nations general assembly in New York. No, we’re not talking about the one where Denmark handed Trump a copy of the 1951 deal over Greenland that already exists, added a couple meaningless phrases to make it look “new,” and told him he had “negotiated” it. But that’s pretty funny too!

Is it the thing where his nurses or handlers or fluffers tell him he’s ended eight wars and he repeats it in public, which is humiliating for everyone, because he’s ended no wars? Well, he did repeat that yesterday while he was babbling next to Zohran Mamdani, mooching off Mamdani’s camera time because the press pool is currently boycotting Trump. It was very embarrassing as usual.

But no, Trump managed another foreign policy humiliation yesterday, in record time too. Oh boy, this is embarrassing.

Trump announced yesterday morning that the “United States” was “working on” a “massive Deal” to buy “Potash” from “Belarus.” This was his latest attempt to tell Canada that he ain’t need you no more!

Big if true!

Also big money laundering to Russia to secretly help Putin with his Ukraine war, or for whatever other purposes Trump might want to secretly pay Putin! (We can imagine about a thousand reasons, including whatever he personally owes the Russian government for election-stealing assistance. For a good State Of The Russia address, click here. It’s not going swell for them.)

Why would we assume that, besides how it’s a pretty safe assumption that anytime Trump farts in the general direction of that region of the world, he’s probably doing it to serve Putin? Well, because Alexander Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, is widely known as “Europe’s last dictator,” and for being a wholly owned subsidiary of Vladimir Putin. He’s the one who wishes the old Soviet Union was back together, that they could all just make Russia great again together. You know, unlike his other former Soviet republic neighbors in Lithuania and Latvia and, of course, Ukraine, which are good countries. (Belarus’s other neighbor Poland is also a cool place.)

But anyway, spoiler, it wasn’t true. Donald Trump is not doing a deal to buy Miracle-Gro or mulch or birdseed or pool noodles or anything else from Belarus, because Belarus ain’t got no Miracle-Gro or mulch or birdseed or pool noodles to sell him.

This is so sad.

Lukashenko just happened to say out loud yesterday that he is sorry, but he has no fertilizer (potash) for Trump or anybody else:

“Even if we wanted to supply [potash] to other, Western markets, we simply do not have those volumes — everything is contracted,” Lukashenko said in remarks published by his office on Monday.

Double burn. He doesn’t have any fertilizer to sell Trump, even if he wanted to. Which means he doesn’t want to.

As The Hill explains, Canada is basically the world’s potash dealer, and 53 percent of its exports go to Trump’s US America, WHICH DOESN’T NEED ANYTHING FROM CANADA, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. Except for how, from the US’s perspective, that 53 percent of Canada’s potash exports amounts to fully 80 percent of what’s used on US American farms.

So no. There is no “very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers,” not about fertilizer, not about anything else.

You know, like formerly Trump-supporting farmer Matt Bell in North Carolina who has seen his diesel costs double, and who because of Trump’s tariffs has also seen all his other costs go up: “Everything we're touching, the fertilizer, fuel, chemicals, seed, parts — you know, the whole nine yards, everything that we touch has gone up.” He added, “We were sold a bill of goods that agriculture was going to be on the forefront … and there was going to be some policy that would put America’s farmers and ranchers first. And right now, that has not happened.”

Also: “We're just getting to the point now there's nothing left to cut. You cannot run without fuel. You cannot run without fertilizer. You have to have that."

But has anybody explained to that guy that Trump eliminated transgender for everybody, and that America is the hottest country in the world now?

Anyway, point is, Natalie probably printed out some AI slop of Alexander Lukashenko opening up his underpants for Trump and all the Miracle-Gro falling out, and he thought it was a real video.

But it wasn’t. Because he ain’t got no Miracle-Gro.

Would Donald Trump like to work on a massive deal with respect to the purchase of beetroot-based soups from Belarus? They have some of that. It’s probably better in Lithuania or Poland, because everything is, but they have some beet soup in Belarus.

No fertilizer.

Launder your blood money to Putin a different way, Donald. We’re sure your crime family will figure out something.

[The Hill]

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Today we have bought Greenland, or something!

I guess it’s “or something.” A few months after Mister President Donald Jesus H. Trump said that anything less than owning Greenland would be “unacceptable,” and that it was “psychologically important” to him, he has inked a deal that is pretty close to the exact same deal as the deal that went before.

But it’s different, actually, you fucking idiot, because this time he posted about it on Truth Social! Under the deal, “no U.S. adversary can EVER have a base in Greenland, have a military presence in Greenland, or make sensitive investments in Greenland, without our express written approval,” some old fuck ranted on social media.

That’s a deal that’s been in place with Denmark since 1951. But hey, cool, whatever! However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the new deal is at least “a hedge against the risk that Greenlanders might someday declare independence from Denmark.” Oh those pesky countries and their desire for independence, amirite?

One of my favorite things about the New York Times in 2026 is how they have fallen all over themselves to both-sides stories so hard that they sound utterly credulous now. It’s like reading the news, but if a bunch of goldfish wrote it!

“President Trump said on Friday that his administration had reached a deal with Denmark and Greenland to expand the U.S. security presence in Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, raising the possibility of a diplomatic solution to a U.S.-made threat that nearly upended the Western alliance,” they said, as though this had come about through a series of normal diplomatic meetings rather than batshit insane posts to Truth Social probably written by a 39-year-old who seems to have formed her personality from the female lead in the film Obsession (2026)!

“The full contours of the deal Mr. Trump was describing were not immediately clear. […] The two sides described the agreement in very different terms [….]” Ah yes, quite! Great job all around everybody!

Trump is almost certainly going to turn this into his usual spectacle this week for the NATO meeting, especially since Fox News has decided that the Emperor’s clothes are quite nice, actually. I laughed so hard reading this.

Speaking on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Center for Security Policy senior fellow and retired U.S. Marine Col. Grant Newsham compared Trump’s pact with Denmark and Greenland to the U.S. acquisition of Alaska in 1867.

Newsham argued the agreement secures vital North American defense geography while limiting Russian and Chinese expansion.

An actual Colonel! Well, now you know it’s legit. Oh yeah man, for sure, Grant, whoever the fuck you are, this is just like when the USA bought Alaska.

Who the fuck is this guy anyway? Let’s take a look at his author page over on Simon & Schuster, because of course he’s flogging a book:

As a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, he covered a number of regions, including East and South Asia, and specialized in insurgency, counterinsurgency, and commercial matters. An attorney, he lived in Tokyo for more than twenty years, working for an investment bank and in the high-tech industry.

Yeah, that tracks. Great job Col. Grant! You tell em!

So it looks like what happened was Trump, who may or may not think he’s on a reality television show where he plays the President of the United States, sharted out some nonsense about Greenland years ago, and now a bunch of fascists have decided to run with it, but they’re too stupid to understand what they are doing so it looks like … well, it looks like this.

Sorry everybody, there are no evil geniuses. Turns out evil is actually pretty stupid! There should be some hope there, but this is 2026, so hope is currently too expensive. Sorry!

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Good morning, here are some things that are happening:

MORAL HIGH GROUND MOMENT: Before we get into Donald Trump’s fascism, I realized I forgot to send y’all yesterday to my latest righteous screed over at The Moral High Ground. In this episode, I lost my shit over an article the Washington Post published bellyaching about “Waaaah, I’m an evangelical. My faith is not a cancer.” (Jennifer Welch had called it a cancer.) I calmly presented the counterpoint: Wanna bet, asshole? Come there and read and subscribe and etc.! [The Moral High Ground]

You guys, Dear Leader finally has Trump TV! Boy, they threw that together fast, after Grandpa’s tantrum at MS NOW, CNN and Politico. Natalie must have been up all night learning how to work a YouTube account. Is this fascism? Yes. Is this going to fail so hard we will never be able to stop laughing? Also yes. [Mediaite]

No really, it is just a YouTube account. [JoeMyGod]

Speaking of Dear Leader, he was craving a fix hard since the press pool abandoned him in solidarity with CNN, which was supposed to be on pool duty yesterday. (They take turns taking the footage that everybody uses.) He had already done an event at the White House with no sound and therefore no platform for his incessant babbling. So when he got to New York to meet with Zohran Mamdani yesterday, he jumped on that mic and camera like JD Vance in the front window of a Haverty’s. Here is a video of Mamdani keeping a straight face for a solid minute while Trump babbles and lies next to him.

Here’s that by-myself nobody-to-scream-at video of Trump at the White House, to laugh at:

Justin Pearson can absolutely win in the newly gerrymandered Tennessee Ninth District, one of the many drawn by Republicans to make sure Democrats and Black folks have no congressional representation in Tennessee. He caught up with TheGrio to talk about how Democrats need to center Black folks and working class voters, instead of treating them like “ornaments.” Pearson is the real deal, also the nominee I am voting for, because that’s my district. [TheGrio]

Funny story! Donald Trump was like SHUT UP CANADA, WE ARE GOING TO BUY FERTILIZER FROM BELARUS BECAUSE YOURS IS STINKY and everybody was like “Belarus? Europe’s last dictator, the one who’s basically Vladimir Putin’s personal assistant? So you’re laundering money to Putin through fertilizer? OK.” But then Belarus was like um, sorry, we do not actually have any fertilizer, therefore we cannot launder your money through fertilizer. Would you like to perhaps cancel your order for beet-based soups with Canada? We have beet-based soups! [The Hill]

How much does everybody hate Donald Trump? Well, his approval rating is down to 32 percent in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. And in another one? 29. TWENTY-NINE. [The Straits Times / Independent]

Um, well, it sounds like that “Clavicular” character, AKA Braden Peters, has been charged with raping and drugging a minor. Not going to add “-xxing” to it, because fuck that trend and fuck that guy. [Bulwark]

Oh, jokes!

FART LEFT.

Get it?

FART! LEFT!

Oh boy, Trump TV and Fart Left in one day, that is just too much.

New stories when we have some!

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Here are some Monday stories:

Morning tabs:

Morning Natalie:

Morning GI Joe Fort:

Morning wankers:

Morning Sunday shows:

Morning wood!

More stories tomorrow when we write them! In the morning!

Malformed booze trollop Pete Hegseth is juggling a lot of balls right now — almost literally, which we’ll get to in a moment. The war in Iran is going badly, US weapons stockpiles have reportedly shrunk to dangerously low levels with no quick restocking available, female Marines are acing the fitness test that Hegseth instituted in the hopes that it would weed all the women out of the military, thereby defeating one of his cherished beliefs that females should limit themselves to homemaking and breeding ...

Truly, it has been a bad time for his worldview, assuming he’s not too deep into a bottle of Mad Dog to notice.

Because things are not going well. In addition to the ungodly strain that he is imposing on America’s military, recent reports are that the Pentagon has been purposefully undercounting the number of American war dead. As if this will make the state of the war look less grim. And if the Pentagon is undercounting the dead, we can only imagine how badly it is undercounting the number of soldiers wounded when Iran bombed several of our Middle East bases to smithereens.

Hegseth has also been a big fan of using AI systems to help America’s war fighters achieve maximum lethality, or whatever. Last week we learned that lethality could have reached nearly unimaginable numbers, if an AI screwup had kicked off World War III with China. So that’s neat.

Here is what happened: a special operations intelligence analyst generated a report with the help of AI, and that report indicated that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was carrying components for building a nuclear bomb, presumably to Iran. The military made plans to send soldiers to board the ship, with aircraft backing them up.

Then, with the planes in the air, planners realized an AI chatbot used to assemble the report had misidentified the cargo, and called off the operation, thereby narrowly averting an incident where American troops would have boarded a Chinese vessel on a mistaken pretext. You can imagine it spinning out from there.

We bet the chatbot’s apology was epic: You’re right, I should have realized China would see an armed force seizing its ship carrying cheap trinkets in international waters as an act of war. I’m sorry, that was my mistake. Let’s fix it. Would you like me to calculate how far the jet stream will carry all the nuclear fallout?

There was also this story from Bloomberg reporting that an over-reliance on AI for targeting bombing missions led the US to blow up an Iranian school that it thought was still a naval installation. The strike killed at least 123 schoolgirls at the beginning of the war:

Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets ... It’s not clear why they had such expectations.

Possibly because dumb people like Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump have been touting AI as some sort of miracle worker. Hegseth has been pushing to integrate AI tools across the military. Don’t expect him to let a little thing like dead Iranian girls or world war slow him down.

As we said, Hegseth is juggling a lot of balls. Including those of his soldiers, as the Pentagon has announced it will institute mandatory testing of testosterone levels in all male soldiers over the age of 30:

Pete Hegseth will make sure that America’s warriors are prodigious fuck machines, or at least will check their morning wood. The military should put that in recruitment ads in some sort of unholy Army-Hims brand mashup. Hi, I’m Doug Flutie. Low libido? Erection problems? Is your inability to be intimate with your partner hurting your relationship? Well, now you can make her smile again by enlisting in the Army! Not only will we teach you how to kill America’s enemies, we’ll give you the tools to once again kill it in the sack! Now that’s something to smile about!

And if that doesn’t work, maybe the Pentagon can call Jake and Logan Paul in to give a motivational speech to the troops for some reason, as it did last week. We’re not sure what the purpose of this was. Maybe Jake’s boxing career needs a boost after he got his jaw broken by an actual boxer last December.

The Pauls are the perfect celebrities for the Trump administration though: D-listers with no discernible talents behind a knack for getting themselves some attention who always look like they just crawled out of a dumpster behind an In-N-Out after getting beaten up and tossed there by the national rugby team.

Given all this, it makes sense that Hegseth would want to take a couple of days off to fly down to Texas A&M, do a little PT with some students while wearing a T-shirt reading THIS IS WAR, give the kids a pep talk about them being warriors for Christ or something, and jinx the school’s Top Ten-ranked football team just before its game against unranked Kentucky.

It was the perfect weekend getaway for a dipshit who oozes insecurity and faux machismo from every pore: hanging out with co-eds half his age.

Hegseth is billing this as the “Send Me Tour,” an explicit nod to a moment in the Book of Isaiah when God asks “Whom shall I send” to be His messenger and Isaiah responds, “Here I am, send me!”

This being Hegseth, the Lord’s message comes with a healthy dollop of LETHALITY FIGHTERS WAR BONER YARRRRRGH:

Well, we guess he does need to recruit soldiers to replace the ones dying in the war we’re losing that Hegseth helped talk the president into starting for no reason.

After Hegseth’s little pep talk, the Texas A&M football team went out and laid an egg against unranked Kentucky in only the fourth meeting of these schools in 74 years. The last time Kentucky won the matchup was in 1952. The Hegseth Curse is real! A&M loses to Kentucky, the US loses to Iran ... is there any contest Pete Hegseth cannot lose? He could be confounded by a doorknob.

Soon, Hegseth will return to the Pentagon to prepare for his upcoming State of the Force speech, which is becoming a yearly tradition, where he invites all the senior military leadership back to the US to sit in a room while he berates them for being a bunch of fatties. This time, he’s making sure at least some soldiers in attendance will meet his exacting standards:

[T]he Pentagon is looking for servicemembers who fit certain “physical standards,” to attend the event: passing the Army’s waist-to-height ratio and the Army fitness tests, and having “impeccable grooming and uniform standards (no exception).”

This obsession with looks and fitness is, in addition to being a silly thing to focus on, so damn creepy. My man, do you want American soldiers at your speech, or do you want Germany’s 1936 Olympics team?

No, no, don’t tell us. Just let us tune in to your speech to see if we’re surprised.

OPEN THREAD.

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Wonkette is old enough to remember when conservatives pretended to love the Constitution. It was bullshit, but they pretended. Mostly gone are the days when they’d hire legal fuckmooks like John Yoo or Johnathan Turley to try to constitutionally figleaf torture and other stuff.

Donald Trump is so openly authoritarian that it honestly turns the Sunday shows into unintentional cringe comedy watching Republicans do logic pretzels.

Let’s dive in.

Mike Waltz

We begin on CNN’s State Of The Union with UN ambassador and Signal chat power user, Mike Waltz.

Host Dana Bash began the interview asking about the response from the US to the Houthi attack in Saudi Arabia, the latest permutation in the ongoing Iranian clusterfuck created by Trump. Waltz, who was national security advisor until he added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to the secret strikes group chats, tried to sound tough and direct.

But when Bash asked about reports that Trump’s war might last until the end of his term, or forever, he suddenly got vague:

BASH: [Trump’s] top advisers are warning that the Iran war could continue through the remainder of the president's term. We're talking 2029. Is that what you think?

WALTZ: Well, I think that time with the president's strategy and Operation Economic Fury is on the president and on the United States's side.

Two things:

1. That’s not “no it won’t.”

2. Are we the only ones who get triggered into remembering Denzel Washington’s 1998 supernatural thriller Fallen every time anyone says “time is on their side”?

Because in both Waltz's statement and in the context of that movie, that phrase is a harbinger of bad things to come and hardly reassuring.

Bash also asked about Trump’s latest assault on the First Amendment, namely banning news outlets from the White House for not kissing his ass enough. Waltz did some old school whataboutism:

WALTZ: Dana, the prior administration limited all kinds of journalistic outfits and journalists themselves that they deemed as right-wing. Those have now been allowed onto the onto the facility.

Oh, yeah, the Trump White House has let such “journalistic luminaries” as [checks notes] Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, beanied “accidental Russian asset” Tim Pool, and Mike MyPillow’s Lindell TV. These are truly equivalent to CNN, MS NOW, and Politico.

It’s the journalistic equivalent of Cecilia Giménez's 2012 “restoration” of Elías García Martínez’s 1930’s Jesus fresco, Ecce Homo, in Spain.

John Barrasso

Mike Waltz was not the only one having a hard time trying to justify Trump’s latest attack on constitutional rights. On NBC’s Meet The Press, host Kristen Welker pressed Republican Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming on whether he believed these bans amount to government censorship.

He said it was fine because Trump was banned from Twitter, which is the same:

“He was banned from Twitter. He was banned from Facebook, and I didn’t see people come to his defense,” the Wyoming senator told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “So it goes both ways. The press has an obligation to report fairly, and the president doesn’t see it happening that way.”

Sure, man.

Steve Scalise

Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise did the whataboutism on ABC’s This Week with Jonathan Karl:

Karl also asked Scalise about former Tarrant County GOP chair and current Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission Bo French, who did racism so bad that it converted Karl Rove into a Democrat, at least for a second:

He said the new magic word!

Bill Cassidy

On CBS’s Face The Nation, outgoing Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, like a Temu Dylan Thomas, is refusing to go gently into that good night (despite everyone’s desires), even though he’s been instrumental in “the dying of the light” of our democracy.

Host Margaret Brennan asked him about presidential failson Donald Trump Junior’s wedding party being paid for by a crony of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

CASSIDY: Any time someone gives a $250,000 gift and they have strong ties to the Kremlin, that’s – that’s wrong. […] And even though in your mind it might be a gift, the appearance of it is really bad.

We’re sure he’ll do something about it.

Maria Elvira Salazar

We conclude with Republican Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar also on CBS’s Face The Nation.

The Miami congresswoman is having a hell of a time trying to save her congressional seat after all the work she’s done to hurt her majority Hispanic constituency.

Salazar’s strategy? To deflect from Trump and blame his “advisers” for his evil immigration policies, without naming any of them specifically, while using the tone of a person trying to talk down a raging baboon about to tear her face off.

SALAZAR: I think that some of his advisers are compromising his legacy. […] And I think it’s my duty, it’s my duty not to attack. […] I’m just forewarning him and advising him […] that some of his advisers are just not presenting the whole picture…

BRENNAN: Secretary Mullin?

SALAZAR: … and that some of the immigration enforcement…

BRENNAN: Tom Homan? Stephen Miller?

SALAZAR: […] He is the president. I – what I’m doing is, I’m coming from an elevated emotion. I’m coming from a good place. I'm telling him, "Sir… this – look what you did [winning the Latino vote in Florida last election]. Don't squander it."

Salazar also tried to defend Trump's decision by Trump to leave Delcy Rodríguez, a person she referred to as a “thief who destroyed Venezuela,” in charge of that country, with similar failed results.

Things aren’t better back home, as the local press in her district has not been gentle, as they have pointed out her rank hypocrisy. Watch this clip of Salazar being called out for taking credit for federal funding for her district that’s been in bills she voted against:

Truly, this “leopards eating faces” moment couldn’t happen to a more deserving ghoul.

Have a week.

[NBC News]

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Far-right mouthbreathers have forced a lifeboat station in Portsmouth, on England’s south coast, to temporarily close down, as part of their campaign to shit up public spaces in order to keep out asylum seekers.

The station has already been closed for more than a week, ever since a bunch of white supremacist scum rolled up to beat up on cops just like it’s the Battle of Lewisham all over again.

Why do I seem so certain of what these assholes are? Well, first of all, it’s obvious. Secondly, the activities of the English Defence League or UKIP whatever those dopes are calling themselves this year is indistinguishable from the pasty, unhygienic-looking National Front/BNP dipshits with their dipshit red suspenders who used to come out to London and do their dipshit Heil Hitler salutes that I had to walk past as a little English kid.

Fuck Nazis and everybody like them forever! They are the reason I am the way I am today.

Anyway, back to the story, you may recall that I wrote last week about a similar bunch of bullshit happening in Dover.

Hey, they were just following odors, I mean orders! Some livestreaming fuck got these assholes all riled up in Portsmouth, just like I wrote about the other day with Dover, and they all showed up to block roads, scream, and stink up the place until police finally started to threaten arrest at 3 a.m.

OK, so here’s where I want to get very serious, because I need to point something out. Many of you may have forgotten this because you are not motivated by intense venom and spite like I am, which is probably better for your blood pressure, but this is exactly the pattern that we saw (and still see) at the US-Mexico border. Same disinfo; same tactics; probably some of the same people involved.

I wrote about it the other day but here’s the short version of how this works:

1. Public figure starts farting out nonsense about [insert out-group here]. That could be immigrants, or trans people like it currently is in a lot of the United States, or women, or people of color, etc. You get the idea. The group doesn’t really matter.

2. Non-public figures start deliberately repeating what they have said, but with more inflammatory language, as they have more freedom to do so. This also includes botnets and fake accounts.

3. A few assholes — the types who always want to go out and beat down on other people, who we used to keep out of our establishments but who apparently now are running fucking foreign policy — go out and beat up members of the new out-group.

4. The public figure who started all this shit goes “See? The public agrees with me!” and passes shitty policy, and all those shitheel mouthbreathers back them up. This offers the illusion of broad support, as long as you don’t look too closely.
   (Variation: Some of those mouthbreathing shitheel bullies also work in the press.)

5. END GOAL: Lots of people who don’t deserve it suffer and die for no reason, because the types of people who should be nowhere near power are now in power. Nice work all around, assholes!

Fun fact: This used to be called “inauthentic organization,” back when all the debunkers hadn’t been canceled yet. (Oh hey look, here’s something I wrote about inauthentic organization around the concept of “critical race theory” all the way back in 2021, and did anybody listen? No they did not.)

In this way it’s possible for the worst scumbags with the least popular opinions on the planet to gin up support for whatever bullshit they want. It turns out a depressing number of people love being told how and what to think and what to do about it, and those types of people love to show up at ports to try to intimidate vulnerable asylum-seekers.

This has been the pattern all the way down the line, because there are a bunch of people who have wormed their way into power who are assholes at best, and eugenicists at worst, and at their service are eager-beaver all-opportunity bigots with absolutely no brains of their own, just waiting to be told who to harass next. It’s how, like, I dunno, for instance, 11 people managed to ban books for half the United States. It’s how all those lickspittles keep on showing up at the US-Mexico border to try to fuck with the asylum-seekers there.

How do I know this? Hahahahahahahahahahaha. I’m soaking in it, just like you!

In fact, the photographs and the footage I’ve seen out of Portsmouth and Dover seem identical to photos and video showing a bunch of American Karens of all sexes with their faces all wrinkled up like anuses because they were screaming racisms at little kids seeking asylum in California a few years back.

Yup, looks just like them!

It’s how it’s worked all along. I hate that it has been going on for years — decades, even — and that many of us have pointed this out, and yet it is still working. It’s like everybody just decided to collectively deny that it’s this easy to manipulate policy in democratic nations by just leveraging a little tiny bit of social pressure.

The solution here is obvious: quit listening to racists. But a lot of politicians don’t want to quit listening to fucking racists, because they are either also racist themselves, or they desperately need to be liked by everybody, even smelly racist turds. To which I say: fucking get over it. No one likes politicians anyway! If you want to be liked, go work as a garbageman. Everybody loves the trash guy!

But once again, England looks like it’s trying to be just like the US of A, with its shitty politicians, its nationalist politicians, and its ugly, smelly, lumpen Nazi scum pretending to just have concerns about “national sovereignty.” Yeah, you know who else had “concerns” about that? The fucking National Front.

In other words, the dipshits you’re listening to are pale, and I do mean pale, imitations of our own dipshits.

Do you really want to be like us, Brits? Do you really?

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First there was Ballroom. Then there was Arch.

We’re talking about Donald Trump’s triumphal arch, of course, the one that he wants to erect on a traffic circle in the nation’s capital, where it can block the currently uninterrupted sightlines between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. That view was laid out purposely for the obvious symbolism of Lincoln being connected to the Union troops Arlington was established to commemorate, but Trump doesn’t care because he thinks the wrong side won the Civil War.

The arch is big, 250 feet tall. It is so tall that there is concern it will endanger planes landing at the nearby Reagan National Airport. This would seem to be the sort of thing that might cause a normal human to rethink the arch’s location, or its height, or better yet, cancel the whole fucking thing and put the money toward feeding the poor or something.

Donald Trump is not a normal person, and besides, what’s an occasional fully loaded 737 crashing into the Potomac if it means Washington DC gets the fascist arch that it was not missing and nobody wanted?

But the planners of the arch came up with a compromise anyway. Now the arch will have an “eternal flame” atop it. Pilots will be able to use it as a reference point when coming in for a landing, so they don’t crash into the giant gilded eagle that’s also going to top the arch.

We suppose they could put plain old warning lights on the arch like every other city does with buildings or radio towers near airports, but then how will people know that Donald Trump is the tackiest human being to walk the earth since Louis XIV’s court still existed?

And that wasn’t the biggest arch news of the week. No, the big news was Trump’s announcement on Sunday that he’s turning the arch into a fortified military redoubt manned by snipers and drones. If General Lee tries to march his army into the city, the Union stands ready:

He’s like a 10-year-old boy playing war: My fort has drones! And snipers! And giant rocket launchers! And a moat with sharks in it! Has no one ever explained to him that G.I. Joe was a cartoon?

Let’s take Trump’s enhancements here one at a time, so that we may laugh at him.

First, drones. Recall that the ballroom is supposed to have what amounts to a drone base on its roof. The man loves his drones. In this case, however, we imagine the military, the FAA, the airport authorities, the airlines, and oh yeah, the passengers, will not be thrilled about putting a launching site for drones right in the middle of the flight path for planes landing at one of the nation’s busiest airports.

Second, snipers? Will the snipers be stationed there full time, in case crime in Washington gets really out of control or Hitler finally builds an aircraft carrier and sends an invasion force across the Atlantic? What are snipers going to cover from that spot? Shooting anyone who dares to mess with the peeling paint in the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial?

Actually, knowing Trump, that probably is what he’s thinking about.

Third, fabulous, now the arch is another military installation with fencing and security checkpoints. You’re gonna need a bigger traffic circle.

What brought about this change in the arch’s purpose, so that it is now apparently vital to the defense of Washington DC, should Johnny Reb attack? We’ve seen speculation from people who should probably know better that this indicates Trump has no intention of vacating office in 2029 and will use the military to stay in power. The arch, along with the constant National Guard presence, the bunker under the ballroom, and the proposal to fence off Lafayette Park and push the White House security perimeter further out, is evidence of this.

We suspect there is a much likelier explanation than the president provoking a crisis that would make January 6 look like a hectic morning at a daycare. Declaring anything as vital to national security helps get it approved by the courts. Specifically the Supreme Court, which already used the ZOMG PRESIDENT DIAPERS NEEDS IT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY “reasoning” to allow construction of the White House ballroom to proceed full speed ahead recently. Trump, facing all sorts of legal headwinds over building the arch, is trying the same move here.

SCOTUS, you will recall, didn’t rule on the merits of whether Trump has the legal right to build the ballroom. It dismissed the case in one of its patented unsigned shadow docket decisions on the theory that the plaintiffs in the case lacked standing. They have set Trump up nicely here to claim the same thing with the groups suing to keep the arch from being built.

So, those veterans who claim the arch will ruin the solemnity of visiting Arlington National Cemetery can look forward to Sam Alito lawsplaining to them why the baby gets to build his giant triumphal arch to loom over the nation’s war dead, and then load it up like it’s an outpost in the Hindu Kush. We’re already outraged.

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[WaPo / FoxDC]

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It has always been entirely reasonable to assume that if Donald Trump does something absolutely insane, it may be because he didn’t have a babysitter. Inviting all the Nazis to Mar-a-Lago for dinner a few years back? He sure got some babysitters afterward!

(That’s right, Donald Trump eats dinner with Nazis, but please tell us more about how Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed are the real problem.)

More recently, we’ve come to understand that if Trump does insane, it might not be that he didn’t have any babysitters, but rather that he had his most favorite, most special, most BEST BABYSITTER EVARRRRRRR babysitter Natalie, the one who honks horns and throws the squeaky toy and puts peanut butter inside his Kong and just gets him alllllll riled up right before bed.

Posting imbecilic AI dictator slop porn pics of himself looking over “his hemisphere,” now that the baby has been tricked into believing he signed a “new” deal regarding Greenland? Well, she’s been with him all weekend, so it’s entirely possible she found that for him yesterday.

HONK HONK! SQUEAK SQUEAK! YOU HUNGRY, MISTER PRESIDENT? YOU HUNGRY? WANT TO GO FOR A RIDE IN THE C-A-R?

She was with him at Camp David, and she came back early with him from that trip too, because of course she did. Important national security needs that only Natalie can attend to. She didn’t have to ride back in the trunk or the wheel well of the plane either, she got to ride back in a separate helicopter with Trump’s other buttsniffer and onetime co-indictee Walt Nauta. (The way Trump has a physical need to always be surrounded by the exact same familiar faces tells you a lot about his mental fitness.)

Now it’s being reported in the Wall Street Journal that a big part of why Trump had a temper tantrum and banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House last week is because Natalie, well, she got him all riled up. This comes immediately after reporting in Politico that it was lack of a babysitter that led to the ban, with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles being out of town.

Which is it? Is it no babysitter? Or is it BEST BABYSITTER EVARRRRRR?

Same diff.

You see, as WSJ tells it, Trump has been very upset that nobody is calling him “SIR, SIR!” with tears in their eyes, thanking him for destroying the Kennedy Center with his tiny hands and his ginormously pathetic ego. Nobody likes it. People who like the arts don’t like it, judges don’t like it, everybody seems to be under the impression that everything he touches dies, just because of how everything he touches dies.

And then on Friday, BEST BABYSITTER EVARRRRR, well, she got him all riled up:

[H]is frustrations reached a fever pitch on Friday, when one of his closest aides, Natalie Harp, showed him clips of anchors on the cable network MS NOW criticizing his administration, according to people familiar with the matter. Hours later, Trump banned the network and two other news organizations from the White House.

And here you thought she only scratched his belly and talked baby-talk to him.

WSJ basically confirms what Politico had earlier reported, that Susie Wiles was out of town. Also, Karoline Leavitt is gone now. But Natalie isn’t gone.

Did he think it through? He did not think it through:

One senior administration official reacted with exasperation to the decision, arguing that the move would do little to achieve the president’s goal of improving press coverage.

Both outlets suggest that aides are frustrated as hell about this, and that many of them were completely blindsided. They know it won’t actually help matters. And when you’re racking up big loser losses at the rate Trump is right now, the last thing he needs is more self-inflicted own-goals.

In related news, CNN, MS NOW and Politico have announced they will be suing the living shit out of Trump over this. Even wingnuts like Ari Fleischer and Fox News personalities have come out against Trump’s impulse decision.

Also:

But the BEST BABYSITTER EVARRR is jangling those keys for him, and that’s all that matters.

Who’s a good boy! Who’s a good boy!

[Wall Street Journal]

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Good morning! We have officially reached the part of the midterms season where ballots have started to go out.

Let’s look at some stories!

Ready for Pete Hegseth to check your morning wood? Be sure to be asleep when he comes in!

Meanwhile, has Secretary Shitfaced been lying about how many troops have been killed in his lost war in Iran? [Times of Israel]

Meanwhile, this weekend Secretary Shitfaced has been in Texas, doing Nazi Christian nationalism dork stuff and shitting on the Bible in front of the troops, trying to get them excited about maybe going off to die in the stupid war he started and lost on the first day, the one his whiskey dick thinks is a holy war against Islam. “Lord, I am here, send me!” Wank wank wank. [JoeMyGod]

Meanwhile, y’all hear that part of the reason he blew a bunch of little girls’ heads off at school in Iran on the first day of that war was because of AI? [Bloomberg]

Meanwhile, did y’all hear Shitfaced’s Pentagon almost started World War III with China accidentally, based on, again, bad AI? [CNN]

Meanwhile, the make-believe “Department of War” is very proud that it invited loser assholes Jake and Logan Paul to the Pentagon to do … ??? [Twitter]

There was some drama this weekend, Trump came home early from Camp David with Natalie, like Trump and Hegseth were about to escalate their lost war. But Trump got spooked at the last minute, we guess, and did not join the Saudis in bombing the Houthis. [Daily Beast / Daily Beast]

Did Trump ban all those news outlets from the White House because he didn’t have a babysitter? Sounds like it. Never, ever leave him without a babysitter. [Politico]

ICE Nazis in Texas are shooting people in cars now. [JoeMyGod]

The US and Denmark have a new “deal” on Greenland that they literally obviously told Trump was a new “deal” so that the senile shitting baby would clap his hands and think he did a new “deal,” and Eric Trump is so stupid he thinks we now have Canada “surrounded.” [Independent / Benzinga]

Meanwhile, the dumbfuck is reposting imbecilic dictator slop Natalie found for him that depicts him looking over the earth at “his hemisphere.” [HuffPost]

Hey you guys, should we renamed AI a “Supreme Intelligence”? Donald Trump thought that might be a good idea, until some of his Christian nationalist followers got pissed. [RawStory]

How Trump Broke The Kennedy Center. Deep dive from NYT. [New York Times]

Uh yes, your honor, Dear Leader absolutely needs his beloved arch in DC, because on top of being ugly, it is going to be a much-needed PODS container for old drones! Yeah you betcha! [Washington Post]

Lauren Boebert: She fuck everybody? Like for real, everybody? [RawStory]

One Million Moms got a boner from socks. [JoeMyGod]

Christ, that is enough stories for now. More when we write some.

Want to read more Evan than just what’s at Wonkette? Visit The Moral High Ground and subscribe to it!

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