I am so fucking tired. And I mean that in the deepest, most bone-level way possible. I am pissed in equal measure, and I am done pretending this is normal or that measured language is going to fix it.
If you’re reading this and you’re not furious, you’re either not paying attention or you are actively part of the problem. There is no third option anymore.
So let’s talk about what “greatness” actually looks like. All of it. No filter.
The Epstein Files and the Cover-Up in Plain Sight
This keeps getting dismissed as conspiracy theory, so let me be crystal fucking clear: it is not a conspiracy theory. It is an adjudicated federal record with a paper trail, a convicted accomplice serving 20 years, and an administration visibly strangling its own disclosure law.
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by a near-unanimous vote — bipartisan, both chambers — and mandated a full release. Trump, the same guy who spent years calling the files a “hoax,” fought it, then signed it, then had his DOJ release documents in waves so heavily redacted that over a dozen Epstein survivors publicly called it “riddled with abnormal and extreme redactions.” [^1] When the noise got too loud, they dropped nearly 30,000 more pages — including a 2020 federal prosecutor email stating Trump flew on Epstein’s jet “many more times than previously reported,” including during the exact period prosecutors were targeting for Maxwell charges. [^2]
Not rumor. Not allegation. A federal prosecutor’s own email. From the DOJ’s own files.
Then NPR ran a forensic investigation using the DOJ’s own serial numbering system and found dozens of pages specifically related to sexual abuse allegations against Trump that are catalogued but never published. [^3] Pam Bondi stood before Congress and swore nothing was withheld for political reasons. The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee — not a Democrat, a Republican — joined Democrats in pledging to investigate whether the DOJ broke the very law it was supposed to enforce. [^4]
The man whose name is woven through the largest child sex trafficking case in American history controls the agency releasing the files about that case. Pages are disappearing. His attorney general is lying to Congress about it. And half the country is either too distracted or too deeply marinated in the Kool-Aid to notice.
I notice. And if you’ve spent the last decade shrieking about imaginary Democratic pedophile rings in pizza restaurants while cheering for the guy whose name is literally in the Epstein files, you can take that energy and shove it somewhere dark and airless.
The War Nobody Asked For and Everybody’s Paying For
Here’s my read, and I’m not hedging it: we are sending Americans to die in Iran as a fucking distraction.
The tariffs cratered. The economy started bleeding. The Epstein pressure was mounting. And then, right on cue, February 28 rolls around and bombs start dropping on Iran. [^5]
That is not a coincidence. That is the oldest playbook in authoritarian politics. Domestic heat gets too intense? Find a war. It moves the news cycle, it wraps the opposition in a flag, and it gets the base screaming about the enemy instead of asking uncomfortable questions about the guy in charge.
We had no casus belli. Iran did not attack American soil. There was no imminent verified threat that justified a full military strike campaign against a sovereign nation. What there was, was a president drowning in self-created problems and a decades-long bipartisan hawkish consensus that made Iran a perpetually acceptable punching bag. So off we fucking went.
Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. The IEA called it the largest oil supply disruption in recorded global market history. [^6] Brent crude blew past $120 a barrel. The Red Sea, already shut through 2025 from Houthi activity, stays shut through all of 2026. Economists are openly using the word “stagflation.” Plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, semiconductors — all taking supply chain hits. [^7] You are paying more for everything. And Americans are dying.
For what? There is no exit strategy. Nobody has explained what winning looks like. Nobody making these decisions has a kid in the line of fire. You do. Your neighbors do. The 20-year-old reservists from Des Moines do. The decision-makers and their families absolutely do not.
You Know It’s Gone Full Lord Farquaad When THESE People Tap Out
You want the most visceral measurement of how far off the rails this has gone? Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene are both calling for the 25th Amendment.
Read that again. Slowly.
Alex Jones. The man who looked into the faces of parents whose children were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School, called them paid crisis actors, and spent years making their grief into a circus until the courts pried close to a billion dollars out of his operation. That guy went on air and said, dead seriously: “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” His own former attorney called it an “internal coup” and said “it’s literally that bad.” Jones — who has spent a decade being a ball-gargling MAGA loyalist — called Trump “an unhinged super villain.” [^8]
And Marjorie Taylor Greene. The congresswoman who got elected after telling people that a Jewish-owned satellite company started California wildfires with a space laser. That woman posted in all caps: “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.” [^9]
These are the people who have spent years screaming that Democrats run child trafficking rings out of pizza restaurants — while the actual federal child trafficking files keep disappearing from the DOJ database. And even they, the bedrock of the lunatic fringe, looked at what’s happening and decided it was too much.
When the Jones/MTG caucus thinks you’ve gone too fucking far, you have left the map entirely. There are no coordinates for where you are. The cartographers have given up.
The Numbers, For the People Who Need Numbers
Freedom House, which has tracked global democracy since 1972, gave the U.S. its lowest-ever score in 2025: 81 out of 100. On par with South Africa. Below South Korea. Below Panama. The three-point single-year drop was matched only by Bulgaria, where elections were marred by outright fraud. Cause of decline: “executive dominance, growing pressure on free expression, and efforts to undermine anticorruption safeguards.” [^10]
Still not convinced? Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index — the same one conservatives love waving at Venezuela and Nigeria — scored the U.S. a 64 out of 100. All-time low. Down 12 points over the past decade. Ranked 29th out of 182 countries. We are tied with the fucking Bahamas. Below Lithuania. Below Uruguay. [^11] The index specifically flagged targeting of independent voices and attacks on judicial independence as accelerating the decline.
U.S. Academic Freedom Index: 85th globally. The country was specifically cited as a case study in institutional collapse, with the cause directly attributed to federal interference in universities and the wholesale politicization of research. [^12]
These are not op-eds. These are the gold standard international metrics that get cited in policy papers and diplomatic briefings worldwide. And every single one of them is pointing at us with both hands.
The Secret Police Aren’t a Metaphor Anymore
ICE has always been a problem. What it has become is a different category of thing entirely.
Scholars who study authoritarian state security services for a living have documented that ICE now checks every box: arbitrary arrests, mass surveillance through private contractors, facial recognition infrastructure, and explicit monitoring of people who criticize the agency — including journalists. [^13] ICE’s headcount more than doubled in 2025 alone. Operations have been deployed specifically and deliberately against Democratic-governed cities and states as political retaliation. In Minneapolis, masked federal agents in military gear patrolled residential neighborhoods with rifles, tear-gassed civilian intersections, and ran paramilitary-style operations on American streets. A 37-year-old American mother named Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent while sitting in her car. The administration immediately called her a terrorist, blocked the state from investigating, and handed the case to its own pet FBI. [^14]
The payout for all this: $7.5 billion a year in fresh funding on top of an existing $10 billion annual budget, while simultaneously dropping training requirements, age requirements, and education standards to pack the ranks faster. [^15]
They are not building a law enforcement agency. They are building a personal paramilitary loyal to one man, dressed in federal badges. And they have not made even a passing attempt to pretend otherwise.
The Projection Was Always a Preview
Trump spent years absolutely shrieking that the DOJ was being weaponized against him. Persecution. Witch hunt. The most unconscionable abuse of justice in the history of the republic. The whole exhausting performance.
His first executive order upon regaining power was literally titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Government.” Within 100 days of signing it, his administration had sicced government power on more than 100 perceived political enemies. Sitting members of Congress. Federal judges. Career prosecutors. He personally went on Truth Social and demanded the DOJ prosecute Senator Schiff by name. Veteran prosecutors who had served under administrations of both parties described what they were witnessing as the administration doing precisely the weaponizing it had spent years screaming about. [^16]
It was never a real complaint. It was a blueprint. They told you openly what they were going to do, framed it as victimhood, and then did it the moment they had the power. And tens of millions of people cheered.
Red State / Blue State: The Data Is Not Ambiguous
The cruelest joke in American politics is that the voters most devoted to this movement are predominantly the ones getting destroyed by its policies. And the numbers aren’t close.
Every serious multi-metric quality-of-life analysis tells the same story: blue states lead in healthcare access, life expectancy, education outcomes, and economic mobility. Red states own the bottom. Before anyone reaches for poverty or geography as an excuse — Texas has the second-largest economy in the nation and the highest uninsured rate at 18.8%. Florida runs consistent budget surpluses and ranks 44th in healthcare access. Vermont, operating on a fraction of either state’s GDP, achieves near-universal coverage. New Mexico — one of the poorest blue states in the country — posts better maternal mortality outcomes than wealthy, oil-rich Texas. [^17]
This is not misfortune. It is a choice, made deliberately, repeatedly, by the people these voters keep electing. The money exists. They decide not to spend it on their own people.
People in Democratic-governed states live longer, earn more, and finish more school. That is federal data, not partisan talking points. And the people dying younger and earning less keep marching into the booth, seeing a red R, and hurr-durring their way into voting against their own survival. Somewhere in the math, 2 + 2 keeps coming out to fish sticks. I genuinely do not know what to do with that except document it and be furious about it.
They Want Everything Their Candidates Are Actively Destroying
Lower drug prices — gutted pharmaceutical oversight. Corporate accountability — direct pipeline from the Treasury to the donor class. Better healthcare — millions losing coverage. Infrastructure — budget slashed. Government off their backs — personal federal paramilitary answerable to one man deployed to their own cities.
The people running this operation are not stupid. They are very deliberately keeping their base enraged, frightened, and informationally starved so that nobody looks too hard at who’s actually reaching into their pockets. It works. It keeps working. The culture war is the misdirection. The economic strip-mining is the point. And the tribe mentality is the mechanism that makes it all function.
He’s Burning It Down Abroad Too, While Dodging the Bill for It
As if the domestic catastrophe weren’t enough, he has spent two terms methodically torching every international relationship the United States has built since 1945.
Trump has threatened to pull the U.S. out of NATO — the alliance that kept Western Europe from becoming a Russian project — across both of his terms. He threatened military force against Denmark over Greenland. He launched the Iran war without consulting a single ally, then raged on Truth Social that “NATO was tested, and they failed” when they declined to join a conflict they had zero input on starting. His own NATO ambassador went on Newsmax and said Trump is “reevaluating” U.S. membership. His Secretary of State repeated it on Fox News. [^18]
Here’s the part that makes the blood pressure spike: European allies didn’t fail anyone. In 2025 alone they increased defense spending by 20%. Every NATO member now meets or exceeds the 2% GDP target for the first time in the alliance’s history. Norway surpassed the United States in per-capita defense spending. European and Canadian defense investment has more than doubled since 2014 — a 106% real increase. [^19] They finally did the exact thing Trump spent years demanding — and he’s threatening to blow up the alliance anyway. Because the bitching was never about burden sharing. It was about leverage, and humiliation, and proving he could make them grovel.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has said plainly: the transatlantic relationship as it existed is gone. Not strained. Not under stress. Gone. [^20] And Europe has rationally concluded that if Washington can’t be trusted, you build your own infrastructure. Sovereign cloud spending is projected to more than triple by 2027. Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands are jointly building homegrown digital systems. Denmark is replacing Microsoft government products with open-source alternatives. The EU is formally funding Linux and FOSS migration. [^21] In 2026, TechCrunch observed that “not being American — nor Chinese or Russian — is increasingly a selling point.” [^22] Seventy-five years of technological and strategic integration with our closest allies, burned down in two terms by a man who thinks loyalty is owed to him personally and not to any institution.
And then there’s what the Iran war is doing to every country in the neighborhood that didn’t ask to be involved. Iranian retaliatory strikes have hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and the UAE — civilian buildings, airports, oil infrastructure. Economies across the Gulf that had nothing to do with starting this conflict are absorbing the damage. [^23]
And here is the part American cable news has been conspicuously quiet about: while the U.S. and Israel were striking hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure, the IRGC was predominantly hitting military bases and industrial facilities. That assessment comes from ACLED — an independent conflict monitoring organization, not Iranian state media. [^24] On the first day of the war, a U.S. Tomahawk missile strike obliterated an elementary school in Minab. 156 people killed. 120 of them were schoolchildren. Amnesty International demanded war crimes accountability. The U.S. military’s own preliminary investigation found the strike was based on outdated targeting data. [^25] The United States bombed an elementary school full of children on the first day of a war it started without a casus belli, and the news cycle moved on inside of a week.
The U.S. has provided over $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since October 2023, functionally bankrolling what the International Court of Justice described as plausibly genocidal acts. More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both World Wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan combined — over 250 verified dead by the UN, many deliberately targeted through a documented Israeli strategy of first running smear campaigns to label reporters as terrorists, then killing them. Independent international media access to Gaza has been blocked for over two years. The U.S. has not only watched this happen but funded it, and simultaneously gutted the foreign aid programs that supported press freedom and humanitarian work globally. [^26] [^27]
And at the center of all of this stands the draft dodger. Five deferments — four for college, one for “bone spurs” diagnosed by a podiatrist who rented his Queens office from Fred Trump as a family favor. [^28] His own lawyer testified under oath before Congress that Trump admitted making up the injury because “I wasn’t going to Vietnam.” [^29] The bone spurs that healed so completely they left no surgical record, no evidence, no scarring from the supposed Butler assassination attempt. Miraculous. The lord truly does provide, especially for wealthy real estate heirs in New York.
This is the man who called John McCain — who was shot down over Hanoi, captured, tortured for years, and offered early release on the condition he’d be used as propaganda, which he refused — “not a hero” because he was captured. Who reportedly called Americans buried at WWI cemeteries “losers” and “suckers.” Who didn’t want amputees and wounded veterans near him at public events because it “doesn’t look good for me.” [^30]
He is Lord Farquaad made flesh. Some of you may die, but that’s a price he is absolutely willing to pay. He avoided the last war he could have been sent to. He started this one. His children are not in it. Yours might be.
The Gulags Are Not Hyperbole
“Detention facilities” is doing an enormous amount of work as a euphemism for what is actually a rapidly expanding archipelago of human warehouses where people are dying at a pace that has no modern equivalent outside of a pandemic.
ICE detention has ballooned by 75% — from roughly 40,000 people to over 68,000, stuffed into more than 100 facilities including literal military-base tent camps in the desert. [^42] More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the previous four years combined. Thirty-two deaths. The most ever recorded outside COVID. In 2026, one person was dying every six days. Forty-six dead in custody since Trump’s second term began as of March 2026. [^43] California’s Attorney General physically toured seven facilities and described conditions as “cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable” — documenting overcrowding, one physician for nearly 1,000 detainees, strip searches used as routine humiliation, medical delays, and inadequate food and water. [^44]
At Camp East Montana — the largest ICE detention facility in the United States, a tent camp on a Texas Army base handed to a private contractor with zero prior detention experience for $1.3 billion — federal inspectors found 49 regulatory violations. Three people have died there. Guards were allegedly betting on which detainee would die next. One man was beaten to death after asking for his inhaler. [^45]
Outside the walls: ICE agents shot 14 people across the country between September 2025 and February 2026. [^46] In Minneapolis, two U.S. citizens were killed — Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother shot in her car, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse shot in the street while multiple witnesses and videos indicate he was unarmed and being physically subdued when the agent fired. After killing both of them, agents performed no CPR. When doctors at the scene tried to intervene, federal agents physically blocked or delayed them. [^47] The administration called both victims terrorists. The videos told a different story. In El Paso, a medical examiner ruled a separate detention death a homicide that ICE had quietly logged as a suicide. [^48]
This is not immigration enforcement. This is state violence against people with no ability to fight back, run by an agency that has been told in every possible way that it will face no consequences.
When states pushed back, Trump federalized the National Guard in California, Oregon, and Illinois — over the explicit, formal objection of all three governors. He deployed 4,000 Guard members and 700 Marines to Los Angeles. For the first time in American history, the Posse Comitatus Act was violated by the executive branch to run immigration operations in a domestic American city. Multiple federal courts found the deployments unlawful. A permanent injunction was issued. [^49] When a reporter asked Trump what the threshold was for deploying active duty military against American civilians, he said: “The bar is what I think it is.” [^50]
The bar is what he thinks it is. The commander in chief of the most powerful military in human history told the press that the standard for pointing guns at American citizens is whatever he personally decides in the moment. In any other country, in any other era of this one, we would call that by its correct name without flinching. We still seem to be flinching.
Killing the Press, Funding the Silence
The administration has been running a sustained, coordinated campaign to destroy every institution with the capacity and independence to document what it’s doing.
Trump put a Project 2025 author — Brendan Carr — in charge of the FCC on day one. Carr immediately reopened a previously dismissed investigation into whether 60 Minutes had “illegally distorted” its Harris interview, after Trump had already personally sued CBS. The FCC has since opened investigations into ABC, NBC, CBS, and local outlets. Companies with pending business before the FCC have been quietly modifying their public positions to avoid regulatory retaliation. The Democratic FCC commissioner said explicitly: “We cannot allow our licensing authority to be weaponized to curtail freedom of the press.” [^31]
Nine hours into Trump’s second term, he suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid designated for press freedom support globally. The United States had been the world’s largest funder of independent journalism protection. Gone before lunch on day one. [^32]
In 2025 on American soil: 170 documented assaults on journalists, 160 by law enforcement. ICE and Border Patrol agents tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and shot journalists with chemical weapons while they were covering protests. Four reporters from a single Chicago newsroom were hit during immigration enforcement coverage. Thirteen lawsuits have been filed against the administration by journalists and media organizations for press freedom violations alone. The assault count nearly matches the previous three years combined. [^33]
In Gaza, the body count of journalists has passed every war in modern memory combined — more than both World Wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan put together. Over 250 verified dead by the UN, most of them Palestinian reporters who were the only journalists left after Israel blocked foreign media access for two years. Many were killed using a documented strategy: smear the reporter as a terrorist sympathizer first, then kill them, then wait for the news cycle to move on. The U.S. has watched this happen, funded the entity doing it, and cut the global programs that would push back against it. [^34]
The goal is simple and ancient: you can’t report what you can’t see, and you can’t see when you’re dead.
America First, Americans Last, Body Count Mounting
“America First” has a body count. Let’s actually look at it.
In his second term alone, Trump has ordered military strikes on nine countries. The Iran war was the ninth military operation. [^35] In just the opening weeks of the Iran conflict: 13 U.S. service members confirmed dead, 200+ wounded. [^36] When the first flag-draped transfer cases came home, Trump went on camera and said — and I need you to read this in his voice — “there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is.” [^37]
Lord fucking Farquaad. Verbatim.
Before Iran, in year one of this second term: at least 125 counterterrorism strikes globally, with fatalities reported as high as 359. Including a strike on a migrant detention center in Yemen that killed 61 African migrants — Amnesty International called it a potential war crime. The civilian casualty review framework that existed to prevent exactly this kind of thing? Scrapped by Hegseth before the ink was dry. [^38]
The Potomac River crash — a military Black Hawk hitting a commercial passenger plane, 67 dead — happened two weeks into the term amid a chaos of staffing cuts and FAA hollowing. Since inauguration: at least 213 aviation incidents, 429 people killed. [^39]
At home: workplace hazards kill roughly 140,000 Americans every year. Under this administration, OSHA enforcement is gutted. The Chemical Safety Board — the independent watchdog that investigates industrial explosions — is targeted for elimination. Mine safety inspections halted. Trump personally signed legislation letting employers falsify workplace injury records with impunity. [^40] In 2025 alone: 215 dangerous chemical incidents. A paper mill in Washington killed 11 workers. A California aerospace plant forced tens of thousands to evacuate. Both disasters came after months of expert warnings about exactly this deregulatory trajectory. [^41]
Every single one of these is a preventable death. The regulations that were gutted exist because people died without them, and someone with a conscience decided that was unacceptable. This administration looked at that history and concluded the real problem was that businesses were being inconvenienced.
This is “America First.” Americans dying in manufactured wars. Americans dying in planes because the FAA was hollowed out for ideology and cost savings. Americans dying on job sites because oversight cuts into profit margins. Americans dying in chemical explosions because enforcement was a “burden.” The people making every single one of these decisions will never stand anywhere near the consequences. You will. Your family will. The people in the line of fire always do.
The Board of Peace: A $1 Billion Shake-Down With Trump as Eternal Chairman
While all of the above was happening, Trump was also busy building what is — and I want to use exactly the right word here — a personal protection racket dressed up as an international peace organization. He called it the “Board of Peace.” He described it as “the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.” [^56] That is a direct quote. He wrote that. About his own thing.
Here is how this magnificent institution actually works: countries get a three-year membership. Want it permanent? Cough up $1 billion in cash within the first year. Where does that billion dollars go? The charter doesn’t say. What the charter does say is that Trump is the permanent chairman — not elected, not term-limited, permanent — that he alone decides who gets invited, that he can eject any member he wants subject only to a two-thirds override, and that he personally designates his own successor. [^57]
Let me just hold that up to the light:
- Chairman forever
- He picks who’s in
- He can kick you out
- A billion dollars to stay permanently
- Nobody knows where the money goes
But it’s called the Board of Peace. Because of course it is.
The signing ceremony at Davos was attended by Argentina, Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, Bahrain, and Kazakhstan — a collection of authoritarian-adjacent governments with limited diplomatic alternatives who showed up to clap. [^58] Every major Western ally stayed home. Zelensky said it was hard to sit at a table with Russia. Meloni — right-wing Meloni, MAGA-adjacent Meloni — cited constitutional concerns and declined. European diplomats told the Washington Post there’s “little appetite to significantly fund an organization that advances a Trump-led world order,” with widespread agreement that the whole thing is being engineered as a personal replacement for the UN, which Trump has been actively gutting and walking out of. [^59]
To be completely clear about what this is: a man under active investigation for connections to the largest child sex trafficking ring in American history, who has started nine wars in a single term, who is under fire from every functioning democracy on earth, decided the problem was that not enough international prestige was flowing in his direction. So he built himself an organization where he is the permanent boss, the money goes wherever he says, and the cover charge is a billion dollars.
But surely this isn’t a grift. Surely.
The Jesus Cosplay, the Prosperity Gospel Con, and the Pope Who Told Him to Go to Hell (Diplomatically)
Let’s talk about the Christianity grift, because it is one of the most cynical, stomach-turning pieces of this entire shit-show, and it does not get nearly enough direct contempt.
Trump has spent two terms wrapping himself in Christianity — specifically the prosperity gospel variant, which is the theological equivalent of a Ponzi scheme. The pitch: God rewards the wealthy because they’re righteous, therefore wealth proves righteousness, therefore the poor deserve their poverty as evidence of their spiritual failure. It is Christianity with the actual teachings of Christ surgically removed and replaced with a justification for hoarding money and telling poor people it’s their own fault. It is the precise inverse of everything Jesus of Nazareth spent his entire ministry arguing. [^60]
Under this banner of weaponized fake Christianity, the administration has gutted every program that could honestly be described as the government doing what the actual gospels instruct. Foreign aid to the world’s most vulnerable people — slashed on day one. Faith-based organizations that have delivered food, medicine, and shelter globally for decades — defunded and attacked. Domestic programs feeding children, housing the homeless, providing healthcare to the poor — cut to bone or eliminated. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — not exactly a left-wing institution — wrote an open letter calling the gutting of foreign aid “a gospel issue” and explicitly condemned “dishonest, personal, and unprecedented government attacks now coming against faith-based service providers.” [^61]
JD Vance, who is Catholic, responded by going on CBS and attacking the bishops.
And then — and this is the part that should have made every self-described Christian voter sit the hell down and reconsider everything — Trump threw a full public tantrum at the Pope.
Pope Leo XIV — the first American-born pope in Catholic history — called out Trump’s threats to “wipe out” an entire Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable” and a violation of both international law and basic human decency. He held a vigil for peace at St. Peter’s Basilica. He wrote that “God does not bless any conflict” and that anyone who follows Christ “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword.” He asked for an end to the killing. He read from the Sermon on the Mount. [^62]
Trump’s response was to log onto Truth Social and have a complete meltdown. He called Pope Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” He told reporters Leo “likes crime” and “is not doing a very good job.” He accused Leo of wanting Iran to have nuclear weapons — a direct lie that PBS fact-checked and demolished; the Pope had explicitly and specifically condemned nuclear weapons. [^63] He claimed personal credit for Leo’s election, saying “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” And then — and I cannot stress enough that this actually happened — he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ on Truth Social, then deleted it.
When asked whether God approved of the Iran war, Trump said: “I do — because God is good and God wants to see people taken care of.”
The Pope of the Catholic Church — leader of 1.4 billion people, head of the two-thousand-year-old institution charged with interpreting the Gospel — said the war was evil and immoral. Trump threw a bitch fit on social media, called him a criminal sympathizer, and posted himself as the Son of God.
JD Vance told the Pope to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” [^64]
A bishop sitting on Trump’s own Religious Liberty Commission called the attacks “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful.” His own hand-picked religious advisors told him he’d crossed a line. He kept going. [^65]
This is what the Christianity grift looks like at full speed: wave the Bible to consolidate power, gut every program the Bible actually commands you to maintain, and when the literal leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination quotes Matthew 5 at you, throw a tantrum on Truth Social and call him a communist.
Even Europe’s Hard Right Is Backing Away From This Clown Show
Here is a genuinely remarkable sentence that I need you to sit with: Italy had to formally declare before its own Parliament that U.S. ICE agents would have “no operational policing powers on Italian soil” because the Trump administration tried to send them to the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. [^51]
The United States exported its domestic paramilitary enforcement arm — the same operation that had just shot two unarmed American citizens dead in Minneapolis — to a foreign country for a sporting event. Milan’s mayor called them “a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips.” He said they were not welcome in his city. Street protests erupted. Italy had to formally limit ICE’s authority as a public concession. [^52]
Italy. Which is currently governed by Giorgia Meloni. A hard-right nationalist. A woman who is nobody’s idea of a liberal. Her government had to publicly tell the United States to rein in its secret police at the fucking Olympics.
And it’s not just Italy. Europe’s far-right parties — the ones who gathered in Madrid literally under a banner reading “Make Europe Great Again” to celebrate Trump’s return — are now sprinting for the exit. [^53] The AfD’s Alice Weidel said Trump “violated a fundamental campaign promise” by interfering in foreign countries. Nigel Farage — Brexit Nigel, MAGA’s most loyal British sycophant — criticized the Greenland threats. By the time the Iran war started, far-right leaders across the continent were openly telling their bases they “cannot be the lap dog of America First.” [^54]
His own ideological allies. The people who were supposed to be proof that MAGA was a global movement. Jumping ship.
Meanwhile the U.S. national security strategy explicitly called for “cultivating resistance” inside European countries and named far-right parties as official “political allies” to be supported against their own governments. [^55] We are not just burning alliances. We are actively running destabilization operations against the democracies of our own treaty partners and publishing it in official government documents.
But surely this isn’t authoritarianism. Surely it’s fine.
What This Term Has Actually Been
Nixon at least had the decency to be ashamed of his crimes. These people post theirs on Truth Social at 3am and triple-dog-dare you to do something about it.
Here’s the full fucking tape. One second term. All of it documented:
The president’s name runs through the largest child sex trafficking case in American history, and his DOJ is actively shredding the files. A war nobody voted for, with no casus belli and no exit plan, launched the exact week the Epstein headlines were getting too loud and the tariff economy was visibly cratering — thirteen American service members dead in Iran while their commander in chief shrugged on camera that “there will likely be more, that’s the way it is.” Nine military operations total in one term, including a strike on a Yemen migrant detention center that killed 61 African migrants and a Tomahawk that obliterated an elementary school on day one of a conflict we started. A domestic enforcement arm that has shot 14 people across the country, executed two unarmed American citizens on camera in Minneapolis, ran guards in a government detention camp betting on which detainee would die next — and one man was beaten to death for asking for his fucking inhaler. Forty-six dead in custody since January 2025, the worst rate in decades, running at one death every six days. Marines deployed to an American city. Three states’ National Guards federalized by presidential tantrum, ruled unlawful by every court that examined it, done anyway. The free press gassed, sued, arrested, defunded, and killed — 170 assaults on journalists in 2025 alone, 160 of them by law enforcement. An FCC turned into a licensing protection racket against any outlet that won’t bend the knee. SCOTUS operating as a party organ. Decades of scientific, medical, and climate research vaporized because it was politically inconvenient. Billions strip-mined from the federal treasury and handed directly to the donor class while the programs keeping working people alive are hacked to nothing. The 75-year transatlantic alliance declared functionally dead by the institutions that built it. Europe spending billions to replace American technology specifically because they can’t trust Washington anymore. ICE arriving at the fucking Winter Olympics in Italy so toxic that a right-wing government had to formally ban them from exercising police powers on their soil. A brand-new “international peace organization” where Trump is permanent chairman for life, you pay him a billion dollars for a permanent seat, and nobody knows where the money goes. A prosperity gospel con used to justify gutting every actual Christian charitable program the government runs, while throwing public tantrums at the Pope for having the nerve to quote Matthew 5 at him and post himself as Jesus Christ on Truth Social.
Every. Single. Item. On that list. Is sourced. Documented. On the public fucking record.
This is not a fever dream. This is not partisan hysteria. This is what happened. These are the receipts. Anyone who looks at this list and still wants to argue about whether it’s “really that bad” has made a choice about whose side they’re on, and it isn’t ours.
All of it in broad daylight. That’s the tell. When you don’t bother hiding the rot, you’ve made a bet that enough people won’t notice, won’t care, or will be ground down too far to act.
So far that bet keeps paying off. And that is on every single one of us.
I’m not writing this for the true believers. You cannot reason with someone who barely had reason to begin with. This is for everyone who’s been grinding their teeth, losing sleep, going hoarse trying to explain what’s happening to people who should be just as furious and somehow aren’t.
You are not fucking crazy. The paper trail backs you up. The international institutions back you up. The scholars who spend their careers studying how democracies collapse are looking at us and saying they recognize every step of this.
We are watching it happen. Live. In public. With the daily receipts posted on Truth Social by the guy doing it, who is apparently constitutionally incapable of doing anything without announcing it first and screaming at anyone who notices.
The question has never been whether you can see the fire. The question is what you’re going to do about it — because waiting for someone else to put it out has not been working, the people supposed to stop this have mostly failed or folded, and the fire absolutely does not give a shit how exhausted you are.
Neither do I, frankly. Get up.
Sources
[^1]: NBC News, “DOJ releases 3rd batch of Epstein files, including some that mention Trump” — Survivors called the initial release “riddled with abnormal and extreme redactions.”
[^2]: NBC News (ibid.) — 2020 federal prosecutor email documenting Trump flew on Epstein’s jet “many more times than previously reported” during the relevant Maxwell charging period.
[^3]: NPR, “DOJ removed, withheld Epstein files related to accusations about Trump” — NPR traced DOJ serial numbers and found dozens of pages catalogued but not published.
[^4]: NPR, “Republicans join Democrats to investigate DOJ on missing Epstein files”
[^5]: Oxford Economics, “The 2026 Iran War, An Initial Take” — U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes February 28, 2026.
[^6]: Wikipedia, Economic impact of the 2026 Iran war — IEA: largest supply disruption in global oil market history.
[^7]: Al Jazeera, “How will the war on Iran impact the US economy?” — Stagflation risk; supply chain hits across plastics, pharma, fertilizers, semiconductors.
[^8]: The Daily Beast, “Alex Jones Calls for Trump’s Removal After Panicking About Failing Health”
[^9]: Fox News, “Ex-Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene joins left-wing calls for the 25th amendment”
[^10]: Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2025 via Courthouse News
[^11]: Transparency International, CPI 2025 via CNN / Progressive Policy Institute
[^12]: Heterodox Academy, “The U.S. Ranks #85 on the 2025 Academic Freedom Index”
[^13]: The Conversation, “How ICE is becoming a secret police force” / Brennan Center for Justice, “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters”
[^14]: MSNBC, “ICE is morphing into Trump’s secret police force before our eyes”
[^15]: ProPublica, “Unfettered and Unaccountable”
[^16]: NPR, “Trump has used government powers to target more than 100 perceived enemies” / NBC News, “Trump DOJ’s ‘weaponization’ group under pressure”
[^17]: Chris Armitage, “Red States: Less Freedom, More Poverty, Shorter Lives”
[^18]: The Hill, “NATO braces for change amid Donald Trump’s withdrawal threats” / Axios, “Trump NATO withdraw allies hurt”
[^19]: Atlantic Council, NATO Defense Spending Tracker — 20% increase in 2025; all allies at 2%+ for the first time; Norway surpassed the US in per-capita spending. / NATO, Defence Expenditures and NATO’s 5% Commitment — 106% real increase over the decade.
[^20]: Lawfare, “The Transatlantic Relationship You Knew Is Gone” / Carnegie Endowment, “Trump Turns NATO into a Tool of Coercion”
[^21]: The Register, “Europe gets serious about cutting US digital umbilical cord” / CNBC, “Europe bids for digital sovereignty amid Russia threats, Trump”
[^22]: TechCrunch, “What’s behind Europe’s efforts to ditch US software in favor of sovereign tech”
[^23]: Human Rights Watch, “Iran: Unlawful Strikes Across Gulf Endanger Civilians”
[^24]: ACLED, Middle East Special Issue: March 2026 — IRGC strikes primarily targeted military and industrial facilities; US/Israeli strikes also hit civilian areas.
[^25]: Amnesty International, “USA/Iran: Those responsible for deadly and unlawful US strike on school must be held accountable” — 120+ schoolchildren killed; US military found strike based on outdated data; war crimes investigation demanded.
[^26]: UN Special Rapporteur press briefing, September 15, 2025 — Gaza “deadliest conflict ever for journalists”; 252 verified dead, many deliberately targeted.
[^27]: Human Rights Watch, “US Foreign Aid Cuts Harm Human Rights Globally” / Quincy Institute/Costs of War Project — $21.7 billion in US military aid to Israel since October 2023.
[^28]: Irish Star, “‘Draft dodger’ Trump slammed for his divisive Memorial Day message” — Daughters of diagnosing podiatrist confirmed diagnosis was a “favor” to Fred Trump.
[^29]: Military Times, “Trump made up injury to dodge Vietnam service, his former lawyer testifies” — Cohen testified Trump admitted faking the injury; no medical records produced.
[^30]: Multiple outlets — Trump called McCain “not a hero” for being captured; reportedly called WWI dead “losers” and “suckers”; barred wounded veterans from events for optics.
[^31]: ACLU, “Trump’s Attacks on Press Freedom Escalate” / Center for American Progress, “The Trump Administration and the FCC Are Weakening Freedom of the Press”
[^32]: Poynter, “The numbers that defined the Trump administration’s attacks against the press in 2025” — Press freedom foreign aid suspended on day one; 13 lawsuits filed against the administration by media organizations.
[^33]: Columbia Journalism Review, “In 2025, Press Freedom Came Under Direct Attack” / Milwaukee Independent, “Journalists face escalating threats in 2026” — 170 assaults in 2025, 160 by law enforcement.
[^34]: UN Special Rapporteur press briefing, September 15, 2025 — Gaza deadliest conflict ever for journalists; deliberate targeting documented. / Quincy Institute/Costs of War Project — $21.7 billion US military aid to Israel since October 2023.
[^35]: National Interest, “Here Are All the Countries Trump Has Bombed in His Second Term” — Iran was the ninth military operation of Trump’s second term.
[^36]: Center for American Progress, “Trump Global Weakness Watch” — 13 U.S. service members dead, 200+ wounded as of March 2026.
[^37]: AOL/People, “Donald Trump Warns ‘There Will Likely Be More’ U.S. Service Members Killed”
[^38]: ProPublica, “The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.” — 125+ strikes in year one, up to 359 reported deaths; Yemen migrant detention center strike killed 61; civilian casualty framework eliminated.
[^39]: Revolving Door Project, Aviation Disasters and Trump Attacks on Air Safety Tracker — 213 aviation incidents, 429 killed since inauguration.
[^40]: AFL-CIO, “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2025” / EPI, “Workers’ health, safety, and pay are among the casualties of Trump’s war on regulations” — OSHA gutted; Chemical Safety Board targeted for elimination; mine inspections halted; employers allowed to falsify injury logs.
[^41]: Time / Common Dreams, “Back-to-Back Chemical Disasters Strike as Trump Seeks to Roll Back Safety Rules” — 215 dangerous chemical incidents in 2025; 11 dead in Washington state; mass evacuation in California; further deregulation planned.
[^42]: American Immigration Council, “Immigration Detention Is Harsher and Less Accountable Than Ever” — 75% population increase; 66,000+ detained; 100+ facilities; tent camps on military bases.
[^43]: KFF, “Deaths and Health Care Issues in ICE Detention Centers Under the Second Trump Administration” — 46 deaths in custody as of March 2026; 2025 highest in two decades; 2026 on pace to exceed it.
[^44]: California AG Rob Bonta, “‘Cruel, Inhumane, and Unacceptable'” — 162% population increase; six deaths between September 2025 and March 2026; strip searches, medical delays, inadequate food and water.
[^45]: ACLU, “Deaths in Detention: ICE Is Rapidly Expanding Detention Camps into Warehouses Despite Record Deaths” — Camp East Montana: $1.3 billion to contractor with no detention experience; 49 violations; three deaths; man beaten to death after asking for inhaler; guards betting on who dies next.
[^46]: NBC News, “Trump’s DHS immigration enforcement officers shot 14 people from September 2025 to February 2026”
[^47]: Marshall Project, “How Many People Have Been Killed by ICE and Border Patrol?” — No CPR performed after shooting Good or Pretti; physicians at scene blocked or delayed by agents.
[^48]: KFF (ibid.) — El Paso Medical Examiner ruled detention death a homicide; ICE had logged it as suicide.
[^49]: Governor of California, “Federal Court Finally Ends Illegal Federalization of National Guard” / OPB — Posse Comitatus Act violated; permanent injunction issued; deployments in California, Oregon, and Illinois all ruled unlawful.
[^50]: PBS News, “What U.S. law says about Trump’s deployment of active duty troops to Los Angeles” — Trump: “The bar is what I think it is.”
[^51]: VISAhq / Reuters, “Italy says presence of U.S. ICE agents for 2026 Winter Olympics will be strictly analytical” — Italy’s interior minister declared ICE would have “no operational policing powers on Italian soil.”
[^52]: TIME, “ICE’s Role at Winter Olympics Draws Ire From Italian Leaders” / NPR, “Milan protesters call for U.S. ICE agents to leave Italy” — Milan Mayor Sala: “a militia that kills.”
[^53]: Fortune / AP, “Europe hates Trump’s play for Greenland so much that even far-right nationalist groups are repulsed”
[^54]: MEXC/Reuters, “Trump’s European allies are abandoning ship: ‘We cannot be the lap dog of America first'” / ECFR, “Trump’s culture war on Europe is far from over” — Weidel: Trump violated his campaign promise; Farage criticized Greenland push.
[^55]: TIME, “Trump Escalates Attacks on European Allies” — U.S. National Security Strategy called for “cultivating resistance” within Europe and named far-right parties as official “political allies.”
[^56]: TIME, “Trump Sets Price Tag for Peace Board Membership” — Trump called it “the Greatest and Most Prestigious Board ever assembled at any time, any place.”
[^57]: Bloomberg / Fortune, “Trump wants nations to pay $1 billion to stay on his peace board” — $1 billion for permanent seat; Trump as permanent chairman with sole power over membership and succession.
[^58]: NBC News, “What to know about Trump’s ‘Board of Peace'” — Major Western allies absent from signing ceremony; Argentina, Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, Bahrain, Kazakhstan attended.
[^59]: TIME, “Who’s Joining Trump’s Board of Peace — and Who’s Not” — European leaders cited lack of appetite to fund a “Trump-led world order”; Meloni cited constitutional concerns; Zelensky declined.
[^60]: Rolling Stone, “Trump’s Long, Strange Relationship With Faith” — Trump’s prosperity gospel roots and their influence on his attacks on the Pope.
[^61]: Charlie Sykes / Substack, “Trump v. Christianity and the New Gospel” — U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called aid cuts “a gospel issue”; Vance attacked the bishops on CBS Face the Nation.
[^62]: FOX News / PBS, “Pope Leo calls out Trump’s Iran rhetoric” — Leo called threats against Iran’s civilian population “truly unacceptable” and held a vigil for peace at St. Peter’s.
[^63]: Al Jazeera / NBC News, “Pope Leo says he does not fear Trump” — Trump called Pope Leo “WEAK on Crime, terrible for Foreign Policy,” accused him of supporting nuclear weapons (false), claimed credit for his election, posted then deleted an image depicting himself as Jesus.
[^64]: PBS News, “Fact-checking Trump’s claim that Pope Leo supports nuclear weapons in Iran” — Pope Leo had specifically spoken against nuclear weapons; Trump’s characterization was directly false. Trump said God approved the Iran war.
[^65]: PBS News, “Trump clashes with Pope Leo” — Bishop Robert Barron, on Trump’s own Religious Liberty Commission, called Trump’s statements “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful.”