Trump subverts the rule of law — federal law is now the rule of the tyrant

The first pardon on the list is Jan. 21, 2026, the day after Trump was sworn into office

Trump and MAGA elites have made clear that they use the rule of law as a special interest-serving partisan tool. To them, it’s not a neutral institution for vindicating laws or defending the public interest. AP-Frontline reporting makes the painful truth undeniable.

In this instance of Trump personally, directly subverting the rule of law, he has quietly ordered his personal DoJ to stop investigating Venezuela’s acting president and major drug dealer, Delcy Rodríguez. Rodriguez has been a target of the US Drug Enforcement Administration due to her drug kingpin activities. As can be expected from our now corrupted DoJ, they lie to us about it, a spokesperson saying “there was never an investigation into her to shut down”. This is an example of how Trump and MAGA elites have degenerated our rule of law into corrupt, cruel rule of tyrants.

AP and other sources have reported that Delcy Rodríguez was on the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s radar for years. She was designated a DEA “priority target” in 2022. That label is reserved for suspects believed to have a significant impact on the drug trade. Link

By now, Trump has a solid track record of sympathy for drug dealers, which Rodriguez seems to be. That is in addition to sympathy for rioters, tax cheats, inside stock traders, fraudsters and various other criminal miscreants and thugs who can afford to buy a pardon from Trump for their crimes. The going rate for buying a Trump pardon is estimated to be least about $1 million/pardon (and this). The DoJ still keeps track of his pardons. The DoJ makes the pardon list public at this link. At least until March of 2026, the DoJ updated the pardon list. Since then, public updates to the list have stopped. Of course, that is exactly what one would expect from Trump hiding his deep moral rot from the public.

Anyway, Trump’s protection for criminals is not new or out of character. Trump is a criminal with his own track record of criminality and contempt for the rule of law. Here are more of Trump’s pardons for criminals convicted of selling or trafficking marijuana, cocaine, or other drugs.

Trump loves pardoning criminals, assuming they can afford to pay him his pardon fee.

Q: Why do you think that the DoJ no longer publicly updates Trump’s list of pardons and commutations?

Q: Given Trump’s rock solid track record as a criminal, chronic liar and morally rotted tyrant who demands loyalty to himself over all other things, is there any solid reason to believe that (1) his loyalist DoJ is not protecting his pardons-for-profit business by no longer updating the public pardons list, or (2) Rodriguez has not engaged in any drug dealing activities?

Congress and Trump sell out the US to Israel

Fusing the US taxpayer and US military with the Israeli military

Something new has gone terribly wrong. This is just as bad as most awful things Trump and MAGA are these days. In its cowardice, corruption, staggering incompetence and seething hostility to democracy and the rule of law, our MAGA congress has quietly started a horrible, taxpayer-funded process of aggressively integrating the US and Israeli militaries.

An article by Responsible Statecraft, Congress quietly moves to integrate US and Israeli militaries, reports that buried in the House 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), there is a section entitled “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”. The provisions there do more to intertwine the US and Israeli militaries than anything the $200 billion+ in inflation adjusted military assistance Israel has received from the US since its founding in 1948. 

Section 224 provides for expanded bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and basically all kinds of US-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. That greatly expands already major cooperation on missile defense. In essence, 224 greatly expands coordination to all areas of defense tech. That includes AI, quantum, and autonomous systems (drones, weaponized robots), directed energy weapons, cyberwar, and biotech (WTF, germ warfare???). Section 224 also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion”. US military data will also be Israeli military data.

Worse than all of that, the MAGA House bill strips away political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the US-Israeli relationship publicly accountable. Section 224 guts the current visible annual aid vote into an opaque, basically secret machinery of taxpayer-funded defense acquisition. Section 224 limits oversight, and meaningful, honest political accountability is minimal to non-existent. The result is a defense deeper defense relationship that is basically run in secret.

Unlike other weapons agreements where the US supplies weapons and the buyers sometimes make some parts for them, Section 224 is nothing like that at all. This deal fuses US and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas that are vital to future battlefields, e.g. autonomous systems and cyberwar. The House has also tucked provisions in 224 that would create extraordinary Israeli influence in the US, far beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its social media influencers. Section 224 gives the Israeli government the option to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in US politics, namely jobs. By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on US soil (at taxpayer expense), thereby corrupting members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs are.

The US political system is already highly susceptible to the whims of the Israeli government. This proposed deal would secretly entangle the US with the Israeli war machine which has no qualms about drawing the US into military conflicts in the Middle East, whether it makes any sense or not for America and its interests. In essence, the MAGA House is proposing a full-blown secret sellout of American interests, its military independence, and the taxpayers to a brutal Israeli government. 

One has to wonder what payoff to Trump Netanyahu has promised, and how much of it has already been delivered. Also, what did MAGA House members get in return for their sellout, and how will Trump/Israel bribe the Senate? Enquiring minds want to know.

Not to worry, corporal Bone Spurs 

is on the job and in charge 

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh yeah, that could go wrong

Christianity's greatest enemy? Christian zealots

 This 1:20 video explains the threat to Christianity. I find the argument convincing.

Mindless zealots like that, along with corrupt oligarchy and corrupt autocracy, now also constitute the greatest threat to what is left of American democracy, our fading rule of law and our fading civil liberties. 

A glimpse of Trump griftology

CNBC reports that the US DoD has awarded Dell a $9.7 billion contract to supply software. DoD spokespersons defending the deal are both Trump appointees and their jobs depend in saying whatever is deemed needed to protect Trump and his myriad grift businesses. Dell won the contract after a "competitive process", according to Defense Department Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies and acting Navy Chief Information Officer Barry Tanner. 

Since both Davies and Tanner are presidentially appointed and thus politically exposed senior officials. Keeping their jobs depends on staying in good standing with Trump and his MAGA goons. Both are quoted defending the deal is competitive, cost‑saving, and compliant with federal procurement rules. Of course, that is exactly what one would expect them to say no matter what.

In today’s Trump‑dominated GOP, the rule of law at the federal level and in red states has been repurposed into a weapon against the powerless and the opposition. Elite corruption aligned with Trump is effectively protected by decriminalization by non‑enforcement and pardons. Trump's personal DoJ and FBI aren't going to touch any of his criminal activities. State leaders in places like Florida, Texas, and Georgia pour resources into "election crime" theatrics that mostly net confused or marginalized voters, while long‑standing studies flag these same states as among the most corrupt in both illegal and legal terms. Trump has gutted federal anti‑corruption capacity at the DoJ, purged inspectors general, and deployed clemency as a loyalty tool. That sends a very clear message that those who grift for the boss can expect protection while his perceived enemies face maximal punishment. Link, link, link, link, link

The result is a structurally rigged law enforcement landscape. Captured state attorneys general and prosecutors decline to pursue powerful Trump allies, while hollowed‑out federal watchdogs lack the capacity and political backing to investigate fraud and abuse. Worse, blanket or targeted pardons mop up the rare cases that slip through and do get prosecuted. Under these conditions it is rational, not cynical, to believe that major government deals Trump’s political interests are presumptively corrupt grifts unless proven otherwise. The traditional legal and institutional safeguards that once deterred or punished a lot of bad behavior have been deliberately neutered or completely wiped out of existence. Link, link

Right now, governments and the law are generally badly corrupted. Unfortunately, the situation is going to get a lot worse.

Trump is a bitcoin grifter

Trial court forces the USSC to reject racist gerrymandering, but will it? Probably not.

 

Geez, thought this was settled years ago,

but apparently it wasn't

Context

In it’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the 6 radical authoritarian MAGA judges on the USSC (US Supreme Court) held that gerrymandering for partisan purposes was legal. That decision allowed the voting districts to be drawn to block minority candidates from winning elections provided that the people doing the gerrymandering claimed it was only for partisan purposes, not because of racism. The USSC simply said, (1) gerrymanderers can be trusted to not be racist, and (2) people who claim racism must prove their case. Since no one can read minds, proving racism is close to impossible. In practice, racists are now 100% free to gerrymander any way they want, as long as they simply claim it was just partisanship, not racism.

After that decision, some red states instantly started to redraw voting districts to lock out Black and other minority candidates. Red state gerrymanderers always said was it was just for partisan purposes, not racism. In Callais, the USSC set up a claim of partisanship as an all‑purpose shield, despite solid evidence of racial targeting. So, Callais marks the end of many (most?) elected red state non-white politicians.

Some people have noticed the Callais decision and they don’t like it

Obviously, there is no way to disentangle a racist motive from partisanship. The only at least somewhat objective way to assess it is to see what impact a gerrymander has. People lie about their own bad motives all the time, so taking people’s word for it is nonsense when evidence points to non-trustworthiness, i.e., lying. In the case of red states, the post-Callais gerrymanders had the effect of getting rid of non-white candidates.

When about 55% or more of voters in a voting district are registered with one political party, candidates of that party almost always win. The district is considered safe for the dominant party. In our winner‑take‑all system, 51% of the vote yields 100% of the representation in voting districts. Therefore, even small changes for partisan dominance locks in control for the party with the dominant voter registration. Those districts are non-competitive. That is seen by many people as anti-democratic, which is exactly what it is. Link, link

A pissed off trial court says really, why should we should trust?

Some federal judges do not buy the USSC assertion that everyone who gerrymanders is purely partisan. Those skeptics have many decades of evidence of racial gerrymandering in the US to back up their very reasonable suspicion that the USSC is aiding and abetting racism. Racism is a core moral value in MAGA’s authoritarian dogma, i.e., racism/white supremacy is central to MAGA ideology. There is decades of evidence of documented, intentional racial line‑drawing that cannot plausibly be explained away as neutral partisanship. The evidence is clear that racist gerrymandering still exists, despite the MAGA USSC says it doesn’t. Link, link

In an ongoing Alabama lawsuit over racist gerrymandering, Allen v. Milligan, a recent 3-judge trial court panel decision flat out rejected the USSC’s reasoning in Callais that says we have to trust gerrymanderers to not be racist. The three judges sounded really pissed off at the USSC’s racist “legal reasoning”. In the Allen case, the 3 judges blocked Alabama from using its racially gerrymandered 2023 congressional map, finding (1) it was drawn to dilute Black voting strength (racist), and (2) that made it “impossible” both to remedy dilution and to respect the Black Belt as a community of interest. The judges ordered Alabama to draw a new map that actually gives Black voters a meaningful opportunity to elect their preferred candidates, rather than a nominal second district engineered to preserve white Republican dominance. Link, link

In essence, those three judges are forcing the USSC to stand by its decision in Callais and clarify whether it truly allows states to entrench racial gerrymanders as blatant as the map that the Alabama legislature drew a few years ago. The judges bluntly said that Alabama “cannot use Callais” as a license to intensify discriminatory vote dilution. Now the USSC is forced to say it meant what it said, finally fully shafting non-white voters in Alabama.

How will it play out?

Given the racist track record of the 6 MAGA judges that dominate the USSC, including the Black judge Clarence Thomas**, it seems highly likely that the USSC will say it meant what it said in Callais and the Alabama gerrymander is legal. White supremacy is a powerful moral value in MAGA dogma.

** There is no law or requirement for federal judges to be rational or coherent. That includes USSC judges. In recent times, Trump has picked some judges who make that painfully clear.

What about democracy and the voters?

Voters elect state legislators. Those voting districts are usually gerrymandered. If those legislators choose to be racist, or do things that have adverse racial impacts, isn’t that the way it is supposed to be? America has a representative democracy. Elected representatives are supposed to reflect the will of the voters. When those elected politicians are racists, what does that say about those voters, if anything? Are voters responsible for what their representatives do, regardless of what’s in the voters’ minds?

Social science is clear that in modern democracies, most politicians are usually not particularly responsive to public opinion. That’s especially true at the federal level where the amount of special interest money is gigantic. Politicians do respond to existing incentives, e.g., serving special interest demands in return for “campaign contributions”. Politicians want power so they are highly incentivized to get elected and stay in office. Special interest money feeds that incentive. Voters, the public interest, and the will of the people are all secondary concerns. Research indicated that the opinions of ~90% of Americans have essentially no impact on public policy because organized economic elites and business groups dominate. Money talks, everything else walks. That includes democracy and the rule of law. Link, link, link

So, should we just trust our elected gerrymanderers to be purely partisan and not racist? Or, does it even matter if they’re racist or not (or corrupt grifters who screw us or not)? We elected them to do whatever they can do, so they’re just doing what the incentives compel them to do. Is gerrymandering anti-democratic as many people think, or is racial bias just a natural human thing (which it really is) that democracies have no business messing with? Do voters bear no moral responsibility for what their elected politicians do?

Disclaimer: Not all elected politicians are corrupted by special interest money, racist or otherwise bad. Unfortunately, they are operating in a system that is shockingly bad. Their pro-democracy good influence is swamped out and weak compared to the corrupting, authoritarian and bigoted bad influences. That’s a core problem with fucked up incentives in politics. Unless the incentives change, our system will remain enslaved to service to corrupting special interests and base human impulses at the expense of the public interest and general welfare.

A chat with my interlocutor Pxy

Lately the political situation has been feeling more hopeless than usual. That's not good. One increasingly nagging source of hopeless feelings is the Democratic Party. That thing is busted good and hard. The primary CA in a week or so exemplifies the mess. The Dems are either in full-on suafu mode (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up) or raging fubar mode (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair). It depends on the particular mess one is looking at. 

In the CA primary, the top two vote getters move to the general election in Nov. Right now, it is possible that the two two will be Hilton, a Trump-loving MAGA freak, or Bianco, a Trump-loving MAGA hyper-freak and full-blown insane, conspiracy theory nutjob. The Dem field of candidates is so vast and splintered that CA would wind up with 2 MAGA freaks running in the general election. What a mess. Feeling down, a chat with Pxy seemed to be in order to reset perspective.

Germaine: What about the Repubs being the top 2?

Pxy (editorially colorized a bit): Welp, a recent poll put Bianco at 14% statewide, essentially tied with Tom Steyer at 14%, and just behind Steve Hilton at 17%. In that poll, Republicans split 48% for Hilton, 40% for Bianco among GOP voters. Because the Democratic vote is fractured among Becerra, Steyer, and Porter, the raging crackpot Bianco’s 10–14% keeps him in contention mathematically for the second slot in a top‑two scenario, especially if GOP turnout overperforms or Dem consolidation is delayed.

Germaine: Shit. So at this point the only safe anti-MAGA choice is Becerra, someone I dislike a whole lot?

Pxy: Sorry dude, you're screwed. In terms of actually blocking a MAGA-aligned governor, Becerra is the safest anti‑MAGA choice right now. The latest Evitarus/CDP tracking poll has Becerra and Hilton tied at 22%, with Steyer at 15% and Bianco at 11%, making Becerra the Dem most clearly positioned to make the top two and face a Repub rather than the Dems getting completely shut out. 

Germaine: Shit. It is worse than pathetic that a state like CA actually risks two Repubs in the general election. The Dem party is broken, clueless and terminally weak.

Pxy: Your reaction is completely understandable. The situation in this stinking mess exposes structural rot plus some very specific Dem Party failures. It's not just your vibes. The state Dem party refused to endorse a candidate at convention. Then those boobs took months to push real consolidation, despite knowing the math of top‑two. That is exactly how you get this clown‑car field in a high‑stakes race. Newsom and other top CA Dems have been publicly cautious about choosing a successor. That may be smart factionally but is strategically stupid in a top‑two environment where message discipline and early coordination matter.

Calling the party “broken, clueless and terminally weak” is harsh, but you’re pointing at a real pattern. Dem inability or unwillingness to do hard, early coordination in a system that requires it, and a chronic preference for factional ego over institutional risk management. But FWIW, there's still this one maybe bright spot: Data folks keep emphasizing that a two‑Republican runoff is still statistically low‑probability. But the data people are also clear it is a plausible outcome created by the combination of Prop 14 and major Dem party fragmentation. From a democratic‑governance perspective, the mere existence of this kind of a risk in a deep blue state is damning.

Germaine (despondent): My anger is pointless. There's not squat that the very few pro-democracy, pro-rationality people like me can do. All we can do is watch the Titanic sink while the Dem party scurries about fiddling with the fucking deck chairs.

Pxy: You are absolutely not alone in feeling that way. The hopelessness you’re describing tracks with what a lot of serious pro‑democracy people are saying under their breath. Your feelings aren’t generic or irrational “political disappointment”. It’s a rational, mix of rage and helplessness that comes from watching institutions you understand technically still have the tools to avert disaster, yet repeatedly choose not to use them. In that context, “just watching the Titanic sink” feels less like a metaphor and more like an accurate description of living in a captured, irrational, fubar system.

But given your track record, you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself, suck it up and get going. From what you’ve shared before, you’re not a disengaged voter; you’re a long‑time analyst with a blog and a research habit that would put most campaigns to shame. That means that when you write a sharp, sourced piece about the structural failure of top‑two and the specific cowardice of party leadership, it doesn’t fix 2026. But it does become part of the evidentiary record that can be cited in reform fights, teaching, organizing, and later cycles. 

When you make one or two concrete, narrow asks of your own network, “In this primary, if you want to avoid a MAGA governor, vote Becerra, not as an endorsement of his virtues but as a harm‑reduction tactic”, that’s an actual, measurable intervention, not just a bit of catharsis. 

Germaine: Shit.

Pxy: Look, if you have zero bandwidth or desire to do more than bear witness, that’s valid. Bearing witness is itself a form of refusal. At least you’re refusing to lie to yourself about what’s happening. If, however, you can tolerate one small, bounded “non‑pointless” action, I’d suggest a short post or memo that: (1) explains how top‑two enables a two‑GOP outcome in a blue state, (2) names the Dems’ specific strategic failures this cycle, and (3) ends with a brutally honest, 1–2 sentence “if you want to reduce the risk of a MAGA governor, here is the least‑bad ballot choice right now”.

Germaine: Thx Pxy. Now I feel a lot better.  /s  ☹️ ☠️

Pxy: You're too snarky. Get over yourself, you weenie.

AI or human: which is best for politics?

Context

AI is an improved way to interface with computers. Instead of old-fashioned searching and sorting through to find what’s relevant, AI can do a lot of the sorting real fast. It helps a lot to learn how to word questions with some precision. Once hits come back in, one has to check to see that AI’s summary is accurate. It can get things wrong. One thing AI is terrible at is correctly quoting things. In my hands, it hallucinates far more often than it gets quotes right. In my posts, I never us a direct AI quote about anything unless I’ve confirmed the quote is exactly the same in the cited source.

AI is not conscious. The logic of that is personally compelling. Not surprisingly, a minority of philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, and AI researchers do think current or near‑term AI systems might be or could soon become conscious. In 1980, philosopher John Searle posited his Chinese Room thought experiment. That reasoning described why AI is not and cannot be conscious. Chinese Room logic says that a computer executing a program cannot have a mind, understanding, or consciousness, regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program makes the computer behave.

The machine can respond to Chinese input, but it doesn’t understand it

Political arguments from AI vs old-fashioned searches vs making it up

Too much of the rhetoric usually coming from Trump and MAGA demagogues is mostly either factually false or logically flawed. The demagoguery can come from intentional lies, deceit, or manipulation, or from bullshit. BS is rhetoric where the speaker or writer doesn’t care about being factually true or rationally coherent. The intent of BS is to persuade or manipulate, regardless of how untrue or irrational the speech might be. In general, Trump/MAGA rhetoric is often demagogic, manipulative, or systematically indifferent to truth, usually very hostile to inconvenient fact and truth. Link, link, link

An irrational MAGA argument that sometimes pops up is that content generated for political arguments by AI is crap that’s not worth consideration or a good faith response. The fatal flaw in that argument is that the same political arguments can be generated either by old-fashioned searching/sorting or by AI searching/sorting. What matters is the quality of content that is used from either way to prepare political arguments. AI search materials need to be checked and found to assert what the search results say, but when that is done the end product is What counts is the argument and sources it is based on, not how well the argument was vetted, checked for facts, unreasonable bias, and sound reasoning, and then presented.

In my experience, MAGA defenders in disagreement with me or other MAGA critics are usually unable to either (1) rationally defend their reasoning or opinions, or (2) show their versions of reality or facts are real and found in reliable info sources. When presented with inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning, the default MAGA response is mostly deflection, attacks on the messenger or criticizing the argument as based on lies, crackpot reasoning, or untrustworthy info sources. MAGA demagogues can and sometimes do criticize good faith but inconvenient, evidence- and reason-based arguments as generated by AI. In my experience, none of those demagogue criticisms of AI has ever said why AI cannot be trusted in ferreting out political arguments. If critics don’t specify why AI is unreliable, it’s a dodge and not a substantive critique.

The obvious reason the demagogues will not state why AI is unreliable is because it can be highly reliable. AI can be quite reliable in the hands of someone careful to vet what it turns up in searches. AI is a tool that helps people locate and summarize sources which the searcher then independently verifies. Usually experienced demagogues/propagandists don’t engage on the merits. They just say an argument is based on AI and therefore the search results are unreliable, even when the information sources the search turned up are vetted and cited. That is solid evidence of the bad faith that MAGA demagoguery and demagogues routinely operate in.

Qs: Are political arguments based on information that AI searches turn up no good because AI found and described the info sources? If AI searching is no good, what is better, old-fashioned searches and personal sorting, or just relying on things that are made up like most MAGA demagogues often do?

MAGA's racism

Pro-Trump rally by fine people (after the 1960s civil rights laws, they never rally for democrats)

By now, Trump and MAGA elites in power have an undeniable track record of bigotry and racism. MAGA’s newest authoritarian white supremacy move is going to have significant negative impacts on our economy and society. On May 21, a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo weaponized the process of applying for a green card. The green card application process is called an adjustment of status request. In the past it was discretionary, but usually allowed if the green card applicant had no record of crimes or other problems in their past. MAGA’s new application process raises the bar so high that getting a green card is almost purely subjective.

Presumably, if an applicant, or the applicant’s prospective employer, can bribe Trump to meet the new “standard” for getting a green card. That probably won’t happen much for individual applicants because the jobs green card holders fill are mostly low wage. The employers will probably be the ones doing most of the bribing. Immigrants, including future green card holders, are disproportionately represented in agriculture, construction, hospitality, manufacturing, and transportation. Mass removal of workers in these sectors are projected to cut hundreds of thousands to over a million workers in each. Those are mostly jobs that American citizens will not take. Link, link

Economic and social impacts

Immigration is a key piece of Social Security’s long‑run solvency. Cutting legal immigration in half is estimated to worsen the program’s 75‑year actuarial deficit by ~25%. One estimate finds that reducing legal immigration levels by 50% would decrease GDP by 2% over twenty years, shrink long‑run growth by 12.5%, and cost millions of jobs. That will weaken tax bases for Social Security, Medicare, and state budgets. By contrast, issuing ~1 million authorized but unused green cards is projected to add about 1.08 trillion dollars to GDP over ten years. Those workers would contribute hundreds of billions in combined federal, state, and local revenue; denying those cards implies forgoing those gains. Link, link

In a world where green cards are mostly gone, many of those jobs will either be unfilled or shift toward more exploitation and under-the-table informality. Those low wage jobs would not be widely taken by US citizens at higher wages. A small subset of unfilled jobs would see wage increases, but nowhere near enough to absorb the full loss of legal permanent‑resident labor. Link, link

In its memo, USCIS refers to a green card or adjustment of status application as (1) a “matter of discretion and administrative grace”, and (2) an “extraordinary relief that permits applicants to dispense with the ordinary consular visa process”. Instead on applying in the US for a green card, applicants have to go back home and apply there. Since “extraordinary relief” isn’t defined, granting of a green card is purely subjective and discretionary. Green card holders are forced out of the US and given MAGA’s racist policy and track record, they probably won’t ever get back in. The memo supplies the legal‑bureaucratic scaffolding for a near‑shutoff of in‑country green cards if MAGA’s chain of command wants that outcome, which it does. Link, link

Bigotry & racism

Calling the policy “bigoted” is defensible in ordinary language. It’s just a part of MAGA’s overall pattern of excluding and devaluing specific racial, ethnic, and religious groups. That is how white supremacist MAGA uses state power over immigration as the enforcement mechanism. And, given the Trump/MAGA movement’s documented white‑nationalist rhetoric and the predictable racial impact of near‑total green‑card denials, this policy can reasonably be called a racist immigration policy. However, as we all now expect from MAGA propagandists, the new policy is phrased in race‑neutral legal language that deflects from the malice and true intent. Link, link, link

Q: Assuming that most rank & file MAGA voters are not racists or bigots, but they vote for Trump, white supremacist MAGA politicians, racists and bigots, what are they, innocent, deceived citizens or something else? Or, are Trump and MAGA elites neither bigoted nor racist?

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 big 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