Monopolize, Purge, Weaponize: Trump’s Three-Pronged Dictator War on Democracy

As is now clear to most reasonably attentive people of good faith with open minds, Trump and MAGA elites are hell-bent on establishing a kleptocratic dictatorship-oligarchy-bigoted Christian nationalist theocracy. America is well on its way to losing its democracy, rule of law and most of what’s left of civil liberties. Two moves by Trump exemplify the conversion of the US into a cesspit of authoritarian bigotry and corruption.

The app from MAGA hell

Government Executive reports that Trump has forced an aggressive MAGA propaganda app to be installed on all federal employee cell phones. Trump’s propaganda weapon, the “White House App”, is a direct way, in addition to demanding loyalty oaths, to further corrupt and politicize federal employees. Going forward, the civil service will be forced to deal with top‑down lies, slanders and authoritarian hate-mongering from Trump and elite MAGA propagandists. As an added bonus, the app’s security weaknesses include (1) silent JavaScript injection into third‑party sites, (2) location tracking every few minutes, and (3) oddly, data flowing to multiple for-profit third parties such as OneSignal, Mailchimp, Elfsight, etc., with dependency on a private developer’s GitHub for embedded content.** The security analysis concluded that MAGA propaganda and sleaze is the least alarming thing about the new app.

**  The private party embedded content problem comes from Trump’s app content being outsourced to an uncontrolled, un-vetted third‑party code source. That content could come from Putin, Satan, Iran, Israel, Melania, Jeff Epstein’s estate, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or anyone else because there’s no independent control on it. Well OK, maybe not Satan or Hunter’s laptop.

One can only wonder how much OneSignal, Mailchimp, Elfsight, etc. paid Trump to get preferred propaganda, sales and marketing access to our defenseless federal employees. Well OK, they’re Trump’s defenseless federal employees. They’re no longer ours. Regardless, this weaponized app is not a neutral IT tool. It’s a dictator-controlled presidential communications propaganda channel. It’s definitely an aggressive MAGA propaganda app.

Trump’s “Schedule Policy/Career” from hell

In other corrupt, bigoted Trump dictatorship news includes his Executive Order from Jan. 2025 regarding Schedule F. In his EO, he renamed Schedule F and now calls this purge, gut and loyalty effort Schedule Policy/Career. The policy under both names was and still is the same. Specifically, his this purge, gut and loyalty policy policy-related civil servants (experienced federal employees) out of the their service positions and gutted their civil service protections. That left Trump free to fire any federal employee for no reason whatsoever. Trump’s goal is obvious. he reclassifies about 50,000 federal employees, allowing mass firings of any perceived “disloyal” experts. They are to be replaced with corrupt, incompetent MAGA loyalist thugs. This is a common, well-known authoritarian patronage move. It’s a very popular tactic with tyrants, kleptocrats, and raging, brutal ideologues like elite racist Christian nationalist theocrats. Link, link

Very popular.

Dictators of a feather flock together

This Schedule Policy/Career dictatorship move is hidden behind and justified by a MAGA legal fiction called the “unitary executive”. That legal theory used to be fringe crackpot belief. But it now dominates among the six MAGA judges who control our now-authoritarian and kleptocratic US supreme court. The core idea is to directly undermine the now dying merit-based, politically neutral civil service built over the last century. It was built that way to limit and prevent spoils‑system abuses. Now there are powerful incentives for federal staff to demonstrate personal loyalty to Trump instead of loyalty to the law and the public interest. Link, link, link, link, link

Q: Do you approve of the kleptocratic dictator-oligarch-Christian bigot-theocrat regime that Trump and MAGA elites are turning America into, or (a) is it no dig deal because both parties are more or less the same, or (b) America has not been any kind of a democracy for a while, if ever?

But they voted for and supported him anyway

The Reductio Ad Absurdum: They Were Going to Install Ahmadinejad!

Regular readers of this blog know I have spent considerable time documenting the weaponization of antisemitism accusations as a tool for suppressing dissent, defunding universities, deporting students, and blacklisting academics. I have traced the organizational infrastructure behind it — the think tanks, the donor networks, the legal strategies, the federal enforcement pipeline — in detail that I won't rehearse here.

But sometimes history hands you something so perfectly, catastrophically self-refuting that extended analysis feels almost beside the point. This is one of those moments.

According to a May 19th report in the New York Times, the original Israeli war plan brought to Donald Trump — the one he enthusiastically endorsed and that has so far killed thousands of civilians, triggered a Strait of Hormuz crisis, and sent inflation surging — included a cornerstone political objective: the rehabilitation and installation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a pliable pro-Western puppet to lead post-war Iran.

Yes. That Ahmadinejad.

The man who called the Holocaust a "myth." The man who hosted an international Holocaust denial conference in Tehran. The man who — and this is not a paraphrase, mistranslation, or decontextualized slogan, but a direct, unambiguous policy statement — said Israel should be "wiped off the map." The man who is, by any serious measure, the most prominent state-level antisemite and Holocaust denier of the 21st century.

We were told Iran was "the head of the snake" — the controlling force behind Hamas and Hezbollah, the existential threat requiring military confrontation. Maybe so. But when you decapitate a snake, the stated goal is presumably something better. Liberation, perhaps. Democracy. The protesters in the streets of Tehran who actually despise the theocracy — the ones Trump occasionally invoked as "our friends, citizens of a great civilization." Surely the plan was to empower them? So we were told in Trump's speech and Netanyahu's right after the first bombs fell in Iran. Wasn't that the plan?

No. The plan was Ahmadinejad. A man so compromised, so despised — in Iran, in the West, in the Arab world, among Iranians in diaspora — that no American anti-Zionist activist, no Palestinian solidarity organizer, no campus protest group would go near him under any circumstances. The people being surveilled and deported wouldn't touch this man with a ten-foot pole. The people doing the surveilling were planning to install him as head of state.

 

That man was to be brought out of house arrest through "light bombing," rehabilitated on the world stage, and installed as the US-Israeli client of choice for a post-regime-change Iran.

Let's sit with that for a moment.

For the past two years, the federal government has been surveilling Jewish Voice for Peace members, deporting graduate students on student visas for attending protests, threatening to defund Harvard and Columbia, and designating "From the River to the Sea" a genocidal antisemitic slogan requiring federal enforcement action. Canary Mission dossiers — compiled by an anonymous far-right blacklisting organization — were fed directly to federal "Tiger Team" agents investigating 5,000+ protesters. Mahmoud Khalil was detained. Rumeysa Ozturk was detained. Faculty have been fired. Entire DEI offices have been dismantled under the banner of fighting antisemitism.

And it turns out that the architects of this campaign were negotiating the rehabilitation of a Holocaust denier they planned to seat in Tehran as their man.

The contrast does not require elaboration. It is its own argument.

"From the River to the Sea" — a phrase whose meaning is genuinely contested among scholars and whose users include Israeli leftists, Palestinians, and international human rights advocates — is treated as an actionable antisemitic threat warranting deportation.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — Holocaust denier, Israel-elimination advocate, architect of state antisemitism as explicit government policy — was to be the vehicle for American-Israeli regional order.

The students were the threat. The Holocaust denier was the plan.

If the goal were actually fighting antisemitism, this would be incoherent. But of course, fighting antisemitism was never the goal. The goal was suppressing dissent against a military and political project. Antisemitism was the instrument — the legal hook, the rhetorical bludgeon, the mechanism for turning "I oppose this war" into "you are a threat to Jewish safety."

The Ahmadinejad revelation doesn't just expose hypocrisy. It exposes the entire apparatus as a fraud. Not a well-intentioned overcorrection. Not a blunt instrument deployed with good faith. A fraud — one in which the people most loudly claiming to protect Jews from eliminationist antisemitism were simultaneously negotiating with its living embodiment.

I have written before about how the "new antisemitism" framework functions not as a sincere moral category but as an enforcement mechanism — one whose application correlates not with actual antisemitic content but with political inconvenience to Israeli state policy. This story is the proof of concept.

You cannot simultaneously deport a Tufts PhD student for a co-signed newspaper op-ed and negotiate the installation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Not if antisemitism is what you actually care about.

But you can do both, perfectly consistently, if what you actually care about is power.

A Trump corruption roundup

Trump corruption has progressed from horrific to worse. Among American presidents probably all elected American politicians, he is in a criminal class by himself. In addition to being a traitor, convicted felon, sex predator, and chronic liar, he’s a world class grifter. And now, much of his grifting is mostly out in the open. A few recent news reports give a glimpse of the vast criminal enterprise that Trump runs. His crime empire is called the federal government.

As part of a settlement agreement announced May 19, 2026, Trump’s Justice Department granted Trump, his family, and his businesses complete immunity from ongoing tax investigations and audits. This provision was quietly added to a broader agreement establishing a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund for Trump supporters. Trump’s acting Attorney General and corrupt MAGA thug Todd Blanche says the government is forever barred and precluded from prosecuting or pursuing any outstanding tax claims against Trump, his relatives, and his business entities. This new immunity grant covers current audits, tax-related prosecutions, and any tax matters, including tax returns filed before the settlement’s effective date. Federal law explicitly prohibits presidents from directing the initiation or termination of IRS audits for specific taxpayers. That includes themselves, unless the USSC steps in and protects Trump again by saying the law does not say what it says. Link, link

Tax experts criticized the deal as probably illegal, but who is going to investigate or prosecute for this likely illegality? Not Trump’s FBI Or his DoJ. The USSC effectively immunized Trump for all crimes he commits while in office. So, why not go on a crime spree if you’re morally rotted enough to want to?

Although IRS attorneys prepared a 25-page memo identified weakness in Trump’s claims against the IRS, Trump’s IRS settled and gave Trump a huge gift worth about $100 million in the form of taxes and fines Trump will never have to pay to the US Treasury. Despite Trump’s lawsuit being without merit, Trump’s IRS recommended that the DoJ dismiss the case and give Trump a fat, juicy gift for his troubles. It’s unclear if the memo even reached its intended recipients at the DoJ. Presumably Trump simply ordered the IRS to back off and grift for him. In dropping the lawsuit against the boss, the DoJ gave no explanation for why it chose settlement over available defenses the DoJ simply threw away to serve the boss and created a $1.8 billion slush fund for Trump.

Trump has disguised our $1.8 billion in tax money as an “anti-weaponization” fund for Trump supporters, but he will figure a way to sink his greedy claws into it in due course. Directly or indirectly, he will benefit from his sleazy slush fund. Acting attorney general Blanche has authority to appoint five commission members to oversee slush fund distribution, but not surprisingly Trump can fire any of them for any or no reason. Eligibility criteria for payments remain undisclosed, so Dog only knows how those tax dollars will be pissed away for Trump’s benefit. Link, link, link

Finally, an update to Trump’s criminal pardons-for-profit grift has spawned a new industry for grifters who are grifting criminals who want to pay Trump for a pardon for their crimes. This festival of sleaze has provoked warning to criminals seeking pardons to be careful about who they hire to Trump’s bribes for their pardons. Current estimates are that Trump will pardon criminals for a bribe of $1-2 million. The intermediary who approaches Trump’s operatives in his criminal pardons enterprise also gets paid. In a news article, How to [Buy] a Pardon in Trump’s Washington, attorney Josh Nass warns criminals that there are people out there falsely promising that they can get a pardon for them from Trump. Nass has been one of the intermediaries with real contacts with Trump’s underlings who run day-to-day operations for Trump’s pardons for bribe business.

The news article quotes Nass giving his warning for criminals to protect themselves from being scammed by grifters: “There are a lot of bad actors out there, promising prospective clients that they can get pardons. You have people who are in desperate straits, and they get taken to the cleaners by people who wind up doing nothing for them. The upside of these pardons is so great. People [convicted criminals] will do anything to get one.”

Those poor criminals. First they get caught and convicted. Then they have to worry about being scammed when they try to go to Trump to buy a pardon. Goodness gracious what is the world coming to when bad crooks are scamming honest crooks just trying to buy a simple presidential pardon? The world is going to hell in a handbasket. /s

For context, it should be noted that, as discussed here at BNR before, Trump’s pardons have cost crime victims and the US Treasury well over $1 billion in fines, fees and crime victim restitution payments. When Trump takes his payment and lets his criminal clients off the hook, he also forgives all payments the crooks were supposed to pay for their crimes. So, when Trump pardons criminals the bribery payment also buys him the satisfaction of shafting crime victims and the US Treasury, i.e., taxpayers. Now that is patriotic MAGA politics in action! /s

Q: Is Trump effectively serving the public interest by selling pardons to convicted criminals, including relieving them of their obligation to pay their victims, by teaching the victims to up their defenses so they’re not victims again?

Some other info sources:

The Trump regime should be covered as a criminal enterprise

President Trump’s staggering record of uncharged crimes

Trump’s war against America’s public health infrastructure

The NIAID’s public interest agenda has been gutted, neutered and corrupted — now it serves Trump’s interests and the interests of pay-to-play players

In addition to putting incompetent, corrupt loyalists like the anti-vaxx crackpot RFK Jr. in positions of federal government power, Trump is gutting and corrupting the NIH and with it much of America’s public health infrastructure. Trump’s moves are a purely authoritarian political project focused on institutional capture. What Trump and MAGA elites are doing has nothing to do with neutral or good faith housecleaning or efficiency. Scientific American Nature and other sources report that eight of ten top officials at NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) have been pushed out for no solid reason. MAGA elites forced senior infectious‑disease experts to accept reassignment or resign. Meanwhile, COVID‑aligned scientists now face fabricated federal charges. Science reports that 14 of NIH’s 27 institutes now lack permanent leaders after Trump’s corrupted HHS blocked reappointments. MAGA elites installed corrupt Trump loyalists, which amounts to direct political interference in and corruption of scientific governance. These moves strip infectious‑disease institutions of autonomous expert leadership. Power over federal public health operations and planning is now centralized in the hands of corrupt, incompetent Trump‑aligned thugs working for special interests mostly at the expense of the public interest. Link, link, link

The pattern of targets and replacements show an effort to punish pro‑vaccine and pandemic‑response science experts while empowering a new health cabal built around crackpots who spout vaccine skepticism and anti‑regulatory ideology. Public Citizen’s profile of Trump’s health team highlights the elevation of RFK Jr., Mehmet Oz, and Jay Bhattacharya, who are all loony-toons with histories of undermining vaccine consensus, promoting privatization, and signaling willingness to use funding and personnel decisions to discipline perceived enemies. NIH whistleblower filings describe how officials who defended childhood vaccine programs or resisted canceling trials were marginalized or removed, while those aligned with administration narratives advanced. These purges of public health experts are not about policy disputes. Instead, this is about about giving power inside health agencies to corrupt, rigidly loyal Trump thugs. Link, link

Trump’s purges are coupled with elite MAGA efforts to control and corrupt information flows and weaken external checks. All of this make the underlying authoritarian motives quite clear. Oversight documents show that Trump and his MAGA elites have purged or restricted key CDC and federal public health datasets, especially ones related to vulnerable populations. At the same time inspectors general have been fired and advisory boards that previously provided independent scientific guidance have been dissolved or replaced. Attacks on scientific journals as MAGA’s latest target and calls to investigate editorial boards are also a part of MAGA’s campaign to destroy institutions that validate and disseminate scientific knowledge. By undermining data, journals, and watchdogs, Trump and his MAGA elites have gutted the capacity of outsiders (1) to contest false MAGA narratives, which are now everywhere, and (2) to document public health threats and harms. Link, link, link

Taken together, the evidence shows an old, coherent authoritarian strategy: purge disloyal experts, stack critical institutions with corrupt, incompetent ideological loyalists, kill off disfavored lines of research, e.g., vaccines, environmental health, and seize control over the production, corruption and circulation of health data. These changes dovetail with major special interests goals such as privatizing Medicare, weakening Medicaid and Obamacare protections, and steering public resources toward pay-to-play commercial and political interests and constituencies. The public rhetoric cynically emphasizes safety or draining the swamp, but the consistent throughline in all of this is the subordination of public health infrastructure to the demands of Trump’s coalition of corruption and the ongoing authoritarian project of delegitimizing expertise in the public interest.

Reasonable, open minds might be wondering about is how dangerous is all of this MAGA authoritarianism and corruption destruction of America’s public health infrastructure? Is my family going to be safe with crooks, cracks and crackpots in power?

Those are very good questions. One thing about it is certain, honest answers will never come from Trump or the elite MAGA thugs he put in power. We have to decide for ourselves how dangerous all of this is and how much danger MAGA’s incompetence and corrupt authoritarianism have put our families in.

Link

Why many Republicans have a deep seated suspicion of expertise and science methods

Believe it or not, science is science, not political or a weapon for evil, unless it has been politicized or weaponized for evil. When politics is ripped out of the picture, science is neutral because reality just is what it is. Science doesn’t care what anyone believes the world or humans to be. However, many or maybe most Republicans no longer trust science or scientists, particularly when the science is politically or personally inconvenient. That distrust exists despite vast, undeniable benefits to modern life that come from from modern science. So why distrust science or scientists, and why is it the decline in trust more pronounced with Republicans than with Democrats?

Well, for the most part the answer to that is decades of demagoguery and propaganda from crackpots, rigid ideologues, radical right authoritarians and parties with lots of money at stake. They have intentionally and knowingly fomented irrational skepticism in science. Some science about this helps clarify the situation. First, the difference in trust is mostly partisan. Republicans really are more skeptical. In view of the overwhelming benefits of modern science, one can reasonably believe the distrust is mostly unwarranted (irrational), political and grounded mostly in decades of mendacity, i.e., the moral rot of demagoguery, propaganda, lies, deceit, etc. 

Second, solid evidence indicates that this partisan political divide is rooted in anti-regulatory, anti-government rhetoric, especially from the Reagan era forward. Conservative and authoritarian elites and institutions cynically framed inconvenient scientific findings, e.g., global warming, as ideologically hostile, politically motivated and thus not trustworthy.

Finally, research on right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation predict rejection of science. Right-wing authoritarianism (a personality trait) and related ideological attitudes predict disagreement with scientific consensus in several domains. That arises from generalized but irrational distrust of science and scientists

It's hard to believe, but stuff like this still needs to be said in public. 

Things are gonna have to get much worse

 Things are going to have to get much worse before they get better. The perversely good news is, it is highly likely that much worse times are on their way. 

As horrified as I was on January 6, 2021, I was also happy about the assault on the Capitol. This might just be bad enough to break the fever, I thought. Trump all but explicitly endorsed the murder of his Vice President. He incited a riot, then sat by for three hours while his followers assaulted police officers and ransacked the United States Congress. This had to be the death rattle of Trumpism.

Not so. 

Within a month, McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago and kissed the ring and McConnell engineered Trump’s acquittal in the Senate. Four years later, the American people re-elected Trump as President. 

For clarity, I’ll describe what I mean by Trumpism and limit myself to one example of each trait. He didn’t invent these traits and habits, but he–like the party he leads–does embody them:

• Demagoguery. Poster Child: “They’re eating the dogs.”

• Gaslighting. Poster Child: Calling legitimate prosecutions “weaponization” of justice while using DOJ to go after the people he has a grudge against–James Comey, Letitia James, Mark Kelly, Jerome Powell.

• Contempt for the rule of law. Poster Child: Illegally firing inspectors general.

• Lies, lies, lies. Poster Child: Calling the Mueller report a “complete and total exoneration.”

• Celebration of brutality. Poster Child: Sending detainees to CECOT and praising it as “great” and a “very strong” facility.

• Contempt for human rights. Poster Child: Utter unconcern at the murder and dismembering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

• Favoring dominance over cooperation. Poster Child: Abandoning the rules based international order for spheres of influence.

• Celebrating dictators. Poster Child: Fawning praise for Putin, Kim, Xi, Duterte, Bukele.

• Contempt for science. Calling climate science a “hoax.”

• Abjectly unqualified appointees. Poster Child: Pete Hegseth.

• Corruption and self-dealing. Poster Child: $TRUMP memecoin.

• Contempt for democracy. Poster child: Pushing states to intensify their gerrymandering.

I could go on, but none of this is news. Plus, it’s too hard to limit myself to one example in each of these categories. The short version: Trumpism is the antithesis of what we have held out as the American ideal for at least the last 75 years–it is the abandonment of democracy and the rule of law in favor of a mercurial brand of authoritarianism.

Our problem is that all these things were widely known in November, 2024, and easily knowable by anybody with a whiff of interest in our world and access to a phone, TV, or computer. But a plurality of our voters did not find these traits disqualifying. They were concerned about the price of eggs, transgender athletes, and/or immigration. 

Since taking office again, Trump’s net approval rating per Nate Silver’s average of polls has dropped from +11.7 when he was inaugurated last year to -19.6 today: a drop of 41.3 percentage points. This drop has come as Americans increasingly feel the squeeze of inflation, have recoiled from ICE brutality on the streets, and are deeply divided over the Iran war.

It’s not enough. 

Barring a sea change, voters will vote widely for Democrats in the mid-terms. But Republicans may retain control of both chambers of Congress due to the idiosyncrasies of the Senate and steroidal gerrymandering in the House. That may be the best outcome for our country. Here’s why:

The electorate needs to clearly see how Trumpism harms us–that its violations of laws, ideals and norms aren’t bad only in the abstract, but that they concretely hurt regular people. In 2024, voters’ perception of their circumstances in the moment overrode any concern for the rules and norms that define the American ideal. And so, I reason, the electorate will not reject Trumpism until we feel a lot of pain and attribute that pain to Trump and the Republican Party. If the Democrats take one or both chambers of Congress, our pain will be less clearly attributable to Trumpism.

It took Hungary sixteen years to vote Viktor Orbán’s party out of office for a second time. Orbán degraded Hungary’s democracy and rule of law in a manner that the US Republican Party adopted as a model. JD Vance went to Hungary last month to campaign for Orbán’s re-election. But the people had finally had enough. 

Eventually we’ll get there, too. When we do, I hope we find a renewed appreciation for democracy, rule of law, truthfulness, cooperation, human rights. If these qualities aren’t important in their own right, perhaps we will rediscover how they contribute to our material well-being.

[By Dan T. I'm also going to post this over on that other site.]

Trump’s pro-pollution policy

Mining bitcoin is claimed to be a nation security concern that justifies breaking pollution law

Last March, Trump announced that polluting businesses could get a 2-year exemption to Clean Air Act regulations. The exemption could be requested by email. Thousands of exemptions were applied for, and apparently nearly all were granted with no science review impacts on public health or the environment. Lawsuits challenging the legality of the exemptions are pending. Science was not any part of the pollution waiver program.

To implement this gutting of the law, Trump had the EPA set up an email address where companies just had to send an email to make their waiver request. An EPA spokesman said that EPA played no role in the determinations set out in the statute and specifically vested in the President. All waiver requests were forwarded to the White House from the EPA.

Trump claims his waivers are legal based on on Section 112(i)(4) of the Clean Air Act. That law permits the President to exempt stationary pollution sources from compliance for up to two years if two conditions are met: (1) the technology needed to comply is unavailable, and (2) granting the exemption serves national security interests. This provision was nvere used by any president in its 55-year history.

The lawsuits argue that Trump’s justification is baseless because pollution controls were already in use at various facilities. That directly contradicts claims that the technology is unavailable.  Some of the utilities that got waivers publicly stated they were already implementing the pollution controls required by existing regulations. That further undercut Trump’s claim that necessary technologies don’t exist.

In its waiver application, one company that burns coal waste claimed that a significant portion of the electricity it generates is used to mine bitcoin. Keeping the cost of environmental compliance low was claimed to be important for the security of the United States. Needless to say, bitcoin mining is not related to national security. Trump granted the waiver anyway.

Also, a medical sterilizer company Sterigenics, asked for a waiver for nine facilities to continue emitting the carcinogenic gas ethylene oxide. The facilities include ones near Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Charlotte and Atlanta. More than 45,000 people, most of them not white, live within a mile of these facilities, according to federal data. Trump granted that waiver too.

What about the flow of wealth & power?

As with essentially all Trump/MAGA policies, wealth and power is affected. In this case, wiping out pollution regulations strips protections from the public interest. That opens the way for wealth and power to flow to the deregulated businesses. The cost and damage to public health and the environment are socialized for taxpayers to bear. Wealth and power flow from us to the deregulated special interests. By now it is clear that transfer of wealth and power from us to special interests is normal and routine for MAGA policy. It can be called trickle-up economics.

When industries are significantly deregulated, most of the benefits flow to the people who control where the benefits go. No surprise there. At most, the public and public interest rarely sees much benefit. Usually net damage is what the public gets. Deregulation doesn’t help us, but it sure does make the elites happy, and richer. Link, link, link

For what it’s worth, contrary to MAGA demagoguery on the point, the Clean Air Act generates approximately $30 in economic benefits for every $1 spent on compliance. That’s a 30:1 return on investment. EPA’s comprehensive analysis found that in 2020 alone, Clean Air Act Amendments prevented over 230,000 premature deaths, with about 85% of economic benefits attributable to reduced mortality from particulate matter. Through 2020, these regulations were projected to deliver more than $2 trillion in health savings at a compliance cost of $65 billion. Link, link

Because of the high level of public benefit from pollution laws, Trump ordered the EPA to stop calculating health-related monetary benefits when setting pollution limits. Now only economic costs to industry are considered. This tactic conveniently ignores high public benefit-cost ratios. Link, link

Q: Is Trump and MAGA’s pro-pollution deregulation good for the public interest, or does it mostly just transfer wealth and power from us to the few people in power at our expense?

Biggest Con of All: The Genuinely Staggering Scale of Trump’s Robbery

The Trump grift-o-meter, at this link!

As time passes, more people are noticing how much of a corrupt politician and thief that Trump is. The take of grifting for Trump and his family is estimated at well above $2 billion since Jan. 2025. That’s a really big pile of grift! One commentator notes that deflections and deceit shield and normalize Trump’s corruption. The MAGA demagoguery war is a deliberately constructed, dense fog of lies and grievance. The purpose is to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms, brown-skinned invaders, tyrannical socialists and other MAGA myths and lies. Meanwhile elites in power and their allies rob us blind.

A former MAGA influencer is talking about how most influencers were paid under secrecy agreements that kept MAGA’s pay-for-demagoguery scheme quiet. Apparently the influencer, Ashley St. Clair, wasn’t on the payroll. She demagogued for free. So, now she is talking about MAGA’s war fog that has kept us distracted and disinformed from the galaxy-scale corruption now well underway with the elite feeding frenzy on our federal government and us.

Why Ms. St. Clair decided to turn against Trump and MAGA isn’t fully clear. Apparently it had mostly to do with her making a baby with Elon Musk, followed by a nasty dispute. Maybe Musk refuses to change smelly diapers. Some reporting had it that Musk allegedly tried to keep the child secret, then a custody and support fight followed. Then St. Clair was targeted by a wave of pornographic AI‑generated images on X. She responded by suing xAI. In return, xAI sued her. It sounds awfully tawdry and messy, sort of like Musk himself. But she does have evidence that most online MAGA influencers are paid by wealthy MAGA operatives or funds. Link, link

She refers to the MAGA man system as a “cult”. Publicly, she says she turned against Trump and MAGA because she hit personal rock bottom, became disillusioned with the movement’s abuses, especially toward women and minorities, and wants to expose a cult‑like, pay‑to‑play propaganda machine she once helped power. What a whacky world we live in!

According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms, some of which are some run by former White House officials, run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or GOP legislative messaging for a flat fee, or on a per-click basis. Capitalism is wonderful, isn’t it? One could think this is an example of pay-to-play politics. Rich MAGA people are paying a small army of morally rotted people to keep us all riled up and distracted from the real job of MAGA governance, i.e., taking as much wealth and power from us and the public interest as they possibly can. Not legally can, possibly can.

Don’t forget, Trump was corrupted and weaponized the FBI and DoJ to shield and serve his crimes. They shield his corruption and that of his donors and allies. There’s a feeding frenzy going on and we are the food. That includes crime victims that Trump shafts for profit.

The Committee for Public Information

Lest we forget, there have been times when our federal government employed massive scale propaganda to con us into sacrificing our literal lives for a cause we didn’t want to support. The Committee on Public Information (CPI), or Creel Committee, was a U.S. government propaganda agency created in 1917 to mobilize American public opinion in favor of entering and fighting World War I.

The CPI used every major medium, newspapers, posters, films, pamphlets, and 75,000 “Four‑Minute Men” speakers, to constantly hammer home pro‑war messages and demonization of Germany. Its propaganda saturated public life with officially approved information. Historians generally judge the CPI effort to be highly effective. A Council on Foreign Relations study said it was possibly the most effective con job of large‑scale war propaganda the world had seen until that time. CPI propaganda successfully conned the American people by changing and minimizing public anti-war and neutrality sentiment. Link, link

CPI propaganda vs. MAGA demagoguery

How do the two compare? They are quite similar, but with (1) modern social media replacing the CPI’s 75,000 Four‑Minute Men speakers, and (2) the goal of hiding Trump and MAGA elites stealing from us by keeping us mostly distracted from what they are doing to us and our democracy, rule of law and civil liberties. In general, CPI propaganda stuck closer to truth by exaggerating it instead of fabricating lies out of nothing, which is standard MAGA demagoguery.

Reading MAGA USSC opinions as propaganda, not law

A great way to get lost in USSC (US Supreme Court) commentary is to argue endlessly about whether the six Republican justices are being consistent textualists, principled originalists, or cautious institutionalists. That gives them too much credit. Based on their track record, a more realistic description is that their opinions are primarily propaganda. The opinions are designed to provide elite cover, manage internal USSC politics, and preserve plausible deniability while advancing MAGA’s corrupt authoritarian, oligarchic, and Christian nationalist theocratic agenda.

That is why the Court’s splintered treatment of the major questions doctrine (MQD) in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump matters. The case was about whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorized Trump’s sweeping tariffs. The court said no. But the opinion also exposed something broader and more revealing. Even inside the authoritarian MAGA bloc, there is no stable, coherent account of what the MQD actually is.

The major questions doctrine is a new USSC rule that says agencies need especially clear authorization from Congress before taking actions on issues of “vast economic and political significance”. The court has used that to strike down major regulations by simply saying that the underlying statute is too vague for such major regulatory decisions. And simple as that, an federal agency is mostly gutted. Protections for consumers, workers, citizens and the public interest get stripped away, leaving the deprotected open for special interests to freely exploit.

On paper, the splintering looks like ordinary disagreement among the MAGA judges. But in reality, it is authoritarian legal performance. It’s theater. Law experts note that Learning Resources produced multiple distinct versions of the MQD. Roberts, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh gave a materially different accounts of when it applies and what work it is supposed to do. That is not a principled legal doctrine. It is what happens when doctrine functions as a flexible partisan tool instead of a binding rule.

The key point is not that one should trust any of these justices to be speaking honestly. Quite the opposite. The MAGA bloc is authoritarian, shamelessly outcome-driven, and unbound by rational consistency. Its opinions should not be read as sincere explanations of legal principle. They are partisan propaganda pieces calibrated for specific target audiences.

One opinion gives lower courts and elite lawyers citations and jargon they can repeat with a straight face. Another lets a justice preserve a preferred personal brand—textualist, originalist, minimalist, institutionalist—while still joining an outcome that serves the same partisan agenda. Different paths lead to the same authoritarian destination.

That explains why the judge’s splintering should not reassure anyone of good faith or principled reasoning. It is tempting to look at fractured concurrences and believe there are serious internal legal principles at work. But the fragmentation easily and effectively serves the authoritarian agenda. It provides cover for MAGA elites by allowing legal commentators and the public to talk about complex doctrinal disagreement instead of wealth and power politics. In other words, fragmentation is a means deflection from MAGA authoritarianism.

It manages the coalition by letting each justice maintain a separate identity and audience while staying aligned on the larger goals of gutting the administrative state and growing and preserving authoritarian power. It also preserves plausible deniability. Nakedly political outcomes are masked by enough technical fog that most non-experts are led to believe they are watching principled hard law disagreements instead of than strategic manipulation.

The MQD is a particularly good example because it was unstable right from the get-go. Even its defenders acknowledge that the “doctrine” is new and contested. Critics have reasonably argued that it operates as a judge-empowering rule that can be switched on or off depending on the Court’s appetite for blocking regulation. From West Virginia v. EPA to Biden v. Nebraska to Learning Resources, the MQD has been used not as a neutral principle with clear boundaries. It is used as a flexible weapon against disfavored exercises of power that serve democracy, honest government and the public interest.

The lesson here is pretty simple. Don’t ask whether the six MAGA judges are really textualists or really disagreeing in good faith. That keeps the debate trapped inside MAGA mythology. The real question asks what function does this opinion, or this split, serve in the larger project of legitimizing MAGA judges, coalition maintenance, plausible deniability, and the transfer of wealth and power from us to authoritarian elites. In the current Court, that is usually the shortest path to understanding what is actually going on.

Info sources:
The Degradation of American Democracy – And the Court
Tallying the Votes from Learning Resources, the Major Questions Doctrine Remains Relatively Confined
Special Analysis: Major Questions Remain About the Major Questions Doctrine
What critics get wrong — and right — about the Supreme Court’s new ‘major questions doctrine’
Getting Right What’s Wrong with the Major Questions Doctrine
The Major Questions Doctrine: Origins, Development, and the Road Ahead After Learning Resources
LEARNING RESOURCES, INC., ET AL. v. TRUMP