Democracy on the Ropes, Capitalism on Steroids

Trump’s foreign-influenced peace plan, DHS interference, extrajudicial military orders, and a political class terrified of the word “socialism.”

Good morning! Pour yourself something strong, coffee, tea, or whatever you use to cope with the accelerating decline of American governance, because today’s news tastes like it was engineered in the same lab where Nestlé makes “cheese flavor.”

We begin in Geneva, where world leaders are treating Donald Trump’s “peace plan” the way you treat a toddler’s finger-painting: smile politely, say “how creative,” and then quietly redo the whole thing when he’s not looking. While Trump spent the weekend accusing Ukraine of “zero gratitude” and accusing Europe of buying too much Russian oil, classic projection from the man who literally begged Putin for favors on live television, the grown-ups sat down and tried to salvage the 28-point surrender document Trump keeps calling a breakthrough.

Marco Rubio emerged afterward declaring it “the most productive meeting so far,” which is diplomat-speak for: “We have begun the process of un-Trumping this proposal molecule by molecule.” Ukraine and Europe arrived with a counter-plan that doesn’t require Kyiv to dismember itself to make Vladimir Putin feel tall.

It gets weird: several U.S. senators say Rubio told them the original document was not really a U.S. plan but a Russian “wish-list” the U.S. received and forwarded to Ukraine. The irony: the plan looks like it was written in Russian, then translated into English, at minimum a result of heavy Kremlin influence.

Inside the U.S. government, we have another crisis of Trumpian governance, this time involving the White House’s sudden, inexplicable desire to intervene on behalf of Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer accused of sex trafficking in three countries. According to ProPublica, a White House liaison named Paul Ingrassia, a man previously bounced from a nomination after racist text messages surfaced, contacted senior DHS officials instructing them to hand back the Tates’ seized electronics. Nothing says “law and order” like the president’s men trying to retrieve potential evidence for an accused trafficker. DHS officials, to their credit, paused long enough to say: “Um, is this legal?” before documenting the whole mess in writing. The Senate Democrats investigating this are treating Ingrassia’s behavior like what it is: brazen interference in a federal probe, the kind you get from a government that thinks the Justice Department is just another branch of customer service for its friends.

In case foreign influence wasn’t enough of a theme this week, Elon Musk’s X accidentally confessed that half of MAGA Twitter isn’t in America at all. Thanks to a new transparency tool, we learned that accounts with bios like “Real Patriot American Mom!!!” are tweeting from Nigeria, India, Thailand, Eastern Europe, and, my personal favorite, a Russian IP block outside Moscow. It’s remarkable how many patriotic Texans live in Lagos. The global MAGA diaspora seems to be operating on the call-center model: press 1 for wall-building rhetoric, press 2 for anti-immigrant memes, press 3 for white-nationalist grievance content. Elon insists this is the “town square,” which is technically true if your town square is a hologram flickering on a broken projector in a foreign basement.

Speaking of cruelty, and Trump never lets us go too long without a fresh dose, he announced on Friday that he is “immediately” terminating Temporary Protected Status for Somali refugees in Minnesota. The number of Somalis with TPS nationwide is a grand total of 705 people. Seven hundred and five. Trump rolled out a full campaign-style speech about “Somali gangs” and “fraud” just to terrorize a few hundred families whose only crime is existing while Black, Muslim, and foreign. Minnesota’s Somali community represents one of the most successful refugee stories in America; Trump treats them like props in his ongoing audition to lead a racist militia. It’s cruelty as governance, cruelty as entertainment, cruelty as reflex. The system works for him only when it’s hurting someone.

But the cruelty isn’t just rhetorical, it’s operational. U.S. troops and officers are quietly seeking outside legal advice, yes, outside the chain of command, because they’re not sure Trump’s orders are legal. When the military begins asking civilian lawyers whether following presidential directives could expose them to war crimes charges, you no longer have a functioning civil-military relationship. Trump’s “Operation Southern Spear,” involving lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in international waters, has raised alarms inside the Pentagon, at the DOJ, and at the United Nations, which has openly called the killings “extrajudicial executions.” The Trump administration’s legal justification seems to be a mix of “trust us” and “don’t ask questions.” Even the CIA expressed concerns. And yet Pete Hegseth continues to swagger around the Pentagon like he’s starring in a rejected SEAL Team reboot while the JAG Corps disintegrates behind him. When even the military’s lawyers are fleeing the building, you know the rule of law has left the chat.

And while America was busy pretending socialism is a slur and extrajudicial killings are just “enhanced maritime operations,” Richard J. Murphy delivered a gut-punch of a lecture on the corporate-engineered poison we call the food system. Ultra-processed foods, as The Lancet now bluntly states, are not food. They are industrial feedstock shaped into edible pucks, engineered to override human appetite, strip nutrition, and maximize corporate profit. The result is a public health crisis we’ve been trained to blame on willpower instead of design. When Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, and Coca-Cola reorganized the global food economy, obesity rates soared, metabolic disease became a business model, cancer rates climbed, and the NHS, like American insurers, began footing the bill for the fallout. Meanwhile, low-wage workers, time-poor parents, and whole neighborhoods without grocery stores are locked into eating whatever the industrial food machine spits out. It’s not a personal failure; it’s a structural trap. It’s the sustainability crisis rendered edible, wrapped in plastic, and sold as “snacks.”

And this brings us to the pièce de résistance: Suri Crowe’s blistering takedown of the House’s anti-socialism resolution, a pantomime vote so cynically stupid it practically registers as performance art. Eighty-six Democrats joined Republicans to condemn “socialism,” a term they clearly do not understand and are terrified to define. Crowe reminds us, quite accurately, that the U.S. is already swimming in socialism, for corporations. Public power? Socialism. Deposit insurance? Socialism. Medicare? Socialism. The Pentagon? The biggest socialist enterprise ever created. But ask Congress to consider socialism for ordinary people, health care, affordable food, clean energy, collective bargaining, and suddenly it’s “tyranny.” Meanwhile, these same lawmakers enjoy fully socialized health care, taxpayer-funded salaries during shutdowns, and a food allowance larger than what a family of four gets on SNAP for an entire week. Crowe’s fury is righteous: capitalism is killing us, and Congress is protecting the corporations doing the killing.

By the time she quotes Harry Truman reminding Americans that “Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made… Socialism is their name for anything that helps all the people,” the whole hypocrisy lays itself bare. Crowe is right: the U.S. has two right-wing parties, one openly fascist, the other so corporate-captured it can’t even bring itself to vote against demonizing the very policies keeping millions alive.

And if all of this feels like a country sliding into something darker, the warping of diplomacy into Kremlin fan fiction, the White House running interference for accused traffickers, the military quietly Googling “how illegal is my mission,” Congress panicking over the word “socialism” while corporate monopolies engineer our food supply, Ty Cobb, of all people, is here to tell you that you’re not imagining it. Trump’s own former White House lawyer went on television and calmly explained that the Constitution was never built to withstand a president as “evil” as Donald Trump. Congress, Cobb said, has “neutered itself,” handing its Article I powers to a man whose governing instincts run exclusively on revenge and violence. The courts, he warned, simply aren’t designed to rescue a country from a president who sees the law as a personal inconvenience. “The Constitution is not adequate to deal with a president as evil as Trump,” Cobb said, and it’s hard to argue with him when you watch Trump threatening lawmakers, denigrating judges, firing military lawyers for advising against war crimes, and celebrating National Guard deployments that federal courts have already ruled illegal.

Cobb didn’t stop at the structural analysis. He said out loud what everyone in Washington whispers: Trump’s instinct, when cornered, is not retreat but violence. “Fight by any means possible, legal or otherwise.” A president who cannot be constrained by Congress, who openly declares war on the judiciary, who turns the Justice Department into a bludgeon and the military into a stage prop, is not a constitutional problem. He is a structural failure the Constitution was never meant to handle. And when a former White House lawyer tells you, on camera, that “we may need to stop worrying about accountability and just get this over,” that the judiciary is the last pillar standing between this country and full authoritarian collapse, you should believe him. The people who saw Trump up close understand that the danger isn’t theoretical. It’s not academic, nor partisan, but it is ongoing.

So here we are, at the end of a week in which Europe tried to rescue diplomacy from Trump’s sabotage, DHS tried to protect evidence from Trump’s operatives, the military tried to shield itself from Trump’s orders, food experts begged politicians to stop corporations from poisoning us for profit, and Democratic lawmakers proved once again that they fear the word “socialism” more than they fear fascism. And into that chaos walks Ty Cobb with the simplest truth of all: our system wasn’t built for this. It wasn’t built for him. And unless the country wakes up to that fact, unless the institutions that still have spines left use them, the rest of us are going to be living on borrowed time.