Dead or Alive, You’re in Trump’s America Now

Markets stumble, Merz falls, Leavitt threatens, students burn, and Social Security starts purging the living.

Good morning! Markets opened down this morning because, of course, they did. Between Germany’s political crisis, Trump’s 1798-inspired deportation binge, and a Social Security Administration that now occasionally forgets who’s alive, investor confidence is understandably brittle. The DAX tumbled 1.8% after Friedrich Merz failed his confirmation vote in the Bundestag, throwing Germany’s leadership transition into chaos and cutting short plans for a triumphant European tour. Merz, a fiscal hawk turned infrastructure crusader, was supposed to bring post-Merkel clarity back to Berlin. Instead, he was blindsided by his fragile coalition and the Trump administration’s not-so-subtle backing of Germany’s far-right AfD. While Merz insisted the extremist party was unfit to govern, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance rushed to defend the AfD as victims of “tyranny in disguise.” Nothing says “America First” like destabilizing a close democratic ally.

Back on home soil, the authoritarian heat is rising. Trump’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, has been amplifying her boss’s increasingly dangerous rhetoric about the judiciary. Leavitt has kept pace, telling Newsmax viewers that “these judges have to understand they are not above the law,” and warning that they will be “held accountable” if they “continue to persecute the president.” She has also shared memes and commentary echoing Trump’s claims of judicial bias. Encouraging hostility toward the courts, whether through veiled threats or full-throated propaganda, may play well with the MAGA base. Still, even conservative jurists are beginning to whisper that maybe, just maybe, they don’t enjoy being cast as enemies of the state.

In a shameful oversight, I forgot to toast Cinco de Mayo yesterday, a holiday the Trump administration hasn’t banned yet, though one suspects it’s only a matter of time before Stephen Miller tries to rebrand it as Cinco de Border Crisis Awareness Day.

There’s always time for a good constitutional crisis. A newly released intelligence memo torpedoed Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify mass deportations of Venezuelan migrants. The National Intelligence Council found no evidence that the Tren de Aragua gang is state-directed or coordinating major smuggling operations, meaning Trump’s narrative of a hostile foreign invasion is pure fiction. That hasn’t stopped him from sending hundreds of people, including at least one legal U.S. resident with no criminal record, to rot in Salvadoran prisons. The Supreme Court has already ruled that deportees must be allowed to file individual challenges, an inconvenient fact Trump continues to ignore, presumably because due process is for suckers.

At the Social Security Administration, things have gotten so efficient that the agency can no longer tell who’s alive. Offices across the country are reporting an uptick in “resurrections”, real human beings walking in to find they’ve been declared dead by a broken database. It's not just an existential crisis; it’s a financial one. When SSA marks you as dead, your bank account freezes, your health insurance vanishes, and your job prospects go up in smoke. The purge, we now know, was orchestrated under DOGE’s direction, part of Elon Musk’s bold vision to modernize government by firing everyone and hoping for the best. More than 7,000 SSA employees have been let go. Thousands of Social Security numbers belonging to immigrants have been purged entirely. When KFF Health News asked the agency for comment, officials passed the buck to the White House, where a spokesperson cited Trump’s “resounding mandate” to make government more efficient. Efficient, apparently, at ending lives on paper, for now.

In Gaza, Israel is preparing to seize and hold the entire Strip as Trump looks on approvingly from a safe diplomatic distance. Humanitarian aid remains blocked, ceasefire talks are dead, and the Israeli military is planning its next escalation to align politely with Trump’s travel schedule. On U.S. campuses, the consequences of this war are being felt in real time. At the University of Washington, more than 25 students were arrested after occupying a Boeing-funded engineering building to protest the defense giant’s role in arming Israel. The group, SUPER UW, called for Boeing to be booted from campus entirely and its donations returned. Instead, the university called in police, lit dumpsters burned in the street, and several students were reportedly injured during the arrest. School officials condemned the action as “offensive,” which is one way to describe teenagers demanding their institution stop cashing checks soaked in blood.

Donald Trump is still seriously considering throwing himself a birthday parade. Sources say planning discussions are underway for a full military spectacle on June 14th, complete with marching bands, tanks, flag-waving schoolchildren, and, one presumes, a flyover featuring gold-plated drones shaped like his head. The idea, reportedly inspired by both France’s Bastille Day and a recurring dream Trump has about saluting himself, would mark the first time in U.S. history that a sitting president celebrates his birthday with government-funded pageantry. White House aides insist it would be “a unifying event,” which in MAGA-speak means a public loyalty test. With civil liberties eroding, desegregation laws vanishing, and immigrant families being deported under 18th-century statutes, nothing says “functioning democracy” quite like a personality cult parade in the middle of June.

And while much of the country is distracted by border stunts and birthday parades, Louisiana quietly became the first state to roll back desegregation orders, turning the clock back to the Jim Crow era with all the grace of a burning cross. Under a new law signed last week and celebrated by state GOP leaders, local school districts will no longer be bound by federal desegregation mandates unless actively ordered by a court, effectively gutting decades of civil rights enforcement. Governor Jeff Landry, who once claimed that DEI policies were a “threat to American values,” praised the measure as a win for “local control.” Civil rights advocates are calling it what it is: a blueprint for modern segregation. In a less subtle time, they used fire hoses. Today, it’s bureaucracy wrapped in faux-populist rhetoric and sold as “school freedom.” The Trump administration has so far remained silent, but given the broader Project 2025 agenda, it’s not hard to guess where they stand. After all, when your national vision includes removing diversity from the military, banning books from classrooms, and dismantling voting protections, why not throw Brown v. Board under the bus too?