America’s Got Grift

Where Enron execs run Social Security, Musk rats gnaw at the safety net, and Trump calls it a “big beautiful bill”

Good morning! It’s only Thursday, but the week already feels like a crash course in authoritarian governance, economic sabotage, and the unraveling of basic competence. Let’s begin, fittingly, with Social Security, because nothing says “stable democracy” like handing over the country’s most beloved safety net to a man linked to the Enron fraud.

Frank Bisignano, DOGE loyalist and former Citigroup executive during the Enron collapse, has been confirmed as Commissioner of the Social Security Administration on a strict party-line Senate vote. This is the same Bisignano who, as Chief Administrative Officer, oversaw Citigroup’s operations while it was helping Enron fabricate profits, mislead investors, and swindle the public out of billions. That Trump would select someone with this résumé to run Social Security isn’t an oversight; it’s the point.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse didn’t mince words on the Senate floor. He accused the Trump administration, and Elon Musk by name, of installing “Musk rats” into the agency to sabotage it from within. The goal? Wreck operations, provoke benefit disruptions, and let private equity tech bros swoop in to “save” the system they deliberately broke. Whitehouse called it what it is: a corporate hostage scenario dressed up as governance. He warned of back doors in SSA systems, embedded sabotage, and a long game to privatize retirement security for 70 million Americans. And yet, the Senate confirmed Bisignano anyway.

Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans are still trying to jam through Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” a reconciliation package that’s turning into a circular firing squad. Trump says he won’t cut Medicaid. His budget says otherwise. Speaker Mike Johnson told moderates that per capita caps on Medicaid are off the table. Then his committee chair, Brett Guthrie, said they’re still alive. The House SALT Caucus can’t even agree on a deduction cap. One member said negotiations had moved backward, from the 25-yard line to the 15. That’s not progress; that’s a fumble and a broken ankle.

If Republicans find the $1.5 trillion in cuts they’ve promised, it’ll likely come from gutting Medicaid access for millions. The CBO says up to 1.5 million people would lose coverage under just one proposal. But the Freedom Caucus says it's not enough. Moderates say it's too much. And Trump, true to form, is stomping around the West Wing, alternately shouting at staffers and flicking through cable news, fuming that no one understands his “vision” while pretending not to hear that his reconciliation bill is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions.

Elsewhere on the legal battlefield, the courts offer rare moments of sanity. A federal appeals court ordered the Trump administration to transfer Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts, from ICE detention in Louisiana to Vermont. Plainclothes agents seized Ozturk under dubious circumstances and have become a symbol of Trump’s academic purge-by-deportation. A bail hearing is set for Friday.

And that wasn’t the only courtroom slapdown. A federal judge halted the deportation of dozens of Asian migrants, some from the Philippines, Laos, and Vietnam, who were reportedly bound for Libya. Yes, Libya. Because in Trump's America, extrajudicial deportation to a war zone counts as immigration policy. The administration had planned to send them on a U.S. military aircraft. What could go wrong?

Well, maybe Anonymous can tell us. The hacker collective reportedly breached Global X Airways, the private company contracted to fly deportees abroad. While no one has formally claimed responsibility yet, internal manifests and flight logs have begun leaking. The airline, whose name sounds like a Marvel villain’s side project, has quietly become the backbone of Trump’s black-ops deportation program. That pipeline now faces sunlight.

Internationally, Trump’s campaign to criminalize international law has reached new lows. American war crimes prosecutor Eric Iverson filed a federal lawsuit after being blacklisted by the administration for working with the International Criminal Court. Iverson prosecutes genocide in Darfur. But thanks to Trump’s February executive order, he’s been sanctioned, frozen, and effectively criminalized for doing his job. Why? Because the ICC might someday investigate Israel or, perhaps, someone closer to Mar-a-Lago.

Even former Bush Solicitor General Paul Clement has had enough. He’s now defending Judge Hannah Dugan, the Milwaukee judge arrested by federal agents for refusing to honor an ICE detainer that lacked a judicial warrant. Clement, long the conservative movement’s legal darling, called the prosecution retaliatory and unconstitutional. It’s a strange moment when civil libertarians and Bush alumni unite to oppose the White House. But here we are.

On the economic front, things aren’t much better. U.S. oil prices are collapsing. Analysts now say crude could dip to $40 a barrel, forcing a shutdown of 2 million barrels of daily American production. That’s not just bad news for Texas, it’s a body blow to the entire industrial economy. Permian Basin producers like Diamondback Energy are already slashing capital investments. Trump’s tariffs, imposed just five weeks ago, appear to have triggered a market share war between OPEC and the U.S., with Russia and Kazakhstan gleefully flooding the market to collapse American output.

In the middle of this mess, China is playing chess while Trump plays Truth Social. Beijing has cut interest rates and begun squeezing U.S. banks out of domestic financial markets, all in advance of upcoming trade talks. It’s a signal that China is done playing defense. With Trump’s tariffs driving global uncertainty, China is asserting its leverage: access to 1.4 billion consumers and a financial system Washington can no longer ignore.

And yet, amid this geopolitical chaos, Trump is claiming victory. He announced a new trade deal with the United Kingdom, his first since tariffs detonated global supply chains. British officials haven’t confirmed it. JPMorgan says its economic impact will be “very small.” The U.K. is just trying to protect its steel and auto industries from American tariffs. But Trump is calling it a “full and comprehensive” agreement. He even scheduled a press conference to gloat. If the optics are good enough, maybe no one will notice that the global economy is on fire.