Bounties, Bench Seats, and Burning Air: The American Empire Punches Down

Trump’s America rolls back climate protections, rewards loyalist thugs, and disappears immigrants, citizens included

Good morning! In the collapsing Republic formerly known as the United States, justice now travels by backhoe, science is subject to podcast approval, and law enforcement functions like a state-sponsored bounty hunting operation. We begin today’s descent with what used to be the Environmental Protection Agency, a name that now reads like something out of a cursed Mad Libs.

Administrator Lee Zeldin, in a performance of deregulatory vaudeville, unveiled a proposal to revoke the 2009 “endangerment finding”, the legal bedrock that defined carbon dioxide as a pollutant and allowed the EPA to regulate vehicle emissions. With the stroke of a pen, the Trump administration is attempting to reclassify climate change as a harmless weather quirk. Why? Because oil companies asked nicely. Because ExxonMobil still has more lobbyists than conscience, and because Donald Trump promised his donors he’d break the thermostat and burn the manual.

If finalized, the EPA’s new rule would eliminate greenhouse gas tailpipe standards altogether. Let me say that again: the agency charged with protecting the environment is proposing not to regulate car pollution because apparently carbon doesn’t count. The move is being celebrated by fossil fuel executives and the American Petroleum Institute, who can barely contain their glee, and condemned by environmental groups who are already preparing lawsuits, because apparently the only carbon-neutral thing left in America is justice.

In a different room of the same flaming mansion, the Senate confirmed Trump’s former personal lawyer Emil Bove to a lifetime seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Bove, whose legal pedigree includes advising DOJ lawyers to ignore federal court orders, reportedly telling them to “f---” the judiciary if it blocked Trump’s deportation schemes, was confirmed on a 50–49 party-line vote, with only two Republican senators (Collins and Murkowski) objecting to giving a would-be autocrat’s fixer a robe and a gavel.

Multiple whistleblowers raised alarms: that Bove misled senators about his conduct in a high-profile DOJ case, that he supported mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act even if it meant defying the courts, and that he approached law as a bludgeon for power rather than a tool for justice. Chuck Grassley shrugged. Thom Tillis grumbled. And then they voted to confirm him anyway.

At the same time, ICE is on an unholy tear across the country. There’s no other word for it. We’re watching what used to be deportation enforcement morph into a system of extrajudicial disappearances, racial profiling, bounty-funded arrests, and family separation so callous it borders on the grotesque.

In Florida, 18-year-old U.S. citizen Kenny Laynez Ambrosio was profiled, arrested, and mocked by agents who assumed he was undocumented. They were wrong. They arrested him anyway. He recorded the encounter. You can hear them joke about the money they’ll get for the arrest, a $30,000 bounty for catching a teenager who’d done nothing wrong except be brown in West Palm Beach.

In Maine, ICE arrested a Black police officer, claiming he was undocumented despite his legal work authorization running through 2030. The officer had been vetted, hired, approved by Homeland Security’s own E-Verify system. ICE took him anyway. Why? Because power requires no justification now. Only obedience.

In New York, agents are rounding up immigrants immediately after their scheduled court hearings, people who were following the rules, granted continuances by judges, only to be detained as they walked out of the courtroom. In Dallas and Los Angeles, detainees report being stuffed into rooms with 30 others, with one toilet, no bedding, no food beyond frozen trays, no AC, and no privacy. At the Baltimore facility, family members report detainees unable to sleep, lacking soap for days, cleaning toilets and showers with the same brush, and being denied warm clothing in freezing rooms.

These are outcomes engineered by Stephen Miller and carried out by an administration that has turned immigration enforcement into a tool of white nationalist retribution. And let’s be clear: ICE is now openly receiving bonuses for arrest numbers, a perverse system that incentivizes brutality, that rewards cruelty, and that encourages agents to treat human lives as currency.

Amid this open-air collapse of rights and reason, Congress has stumbled across a moment of rare bipartisan functionality. The ROAD to Housing Act of 2025, a sweeping housing bill led by Senators Warren and Tim Scott, advanced unanimously out of committee yesterday. It’s a bill aimed at boosting housing supply, easing zoning restrictions, and empowering HUD to streamline building projects and support innovation at the local level.

There’s only one small problem: the Trump administration is actively gutting HUD at the very moment Congress is asking it to do more. Budgets are slashed, staff are purged, programs are frozen. It’s like trying to fix a roof while someone takes a chainsaw to the foundation. The bill is ambitious, and the need is urgent. But unless the agency survives the MAGA wrecking ball, the best-laid housing policy won’t matter, no one will be left to enforce it.

Here we are, at the threshold of August 2025, with carbon emissions set to soar, immigrants disappearing into overcrowded holding cells, Trump loyalists stacking the courts, and the federal government issuing bounties on its own citizens, all while Congress gestures vaguely at housing reform and hopes someone still remembers how to build.

Welcome to the empire in decline. No seat belts, no brakes, and the air just got a lot harder to breathe.