Due Process, Dirty Money, and Digital Chainsaws: Another Day in the Trumpocalypse

From Vatican snubs to vanished warrants, Trump’s 100-day reign blends authoritarian spectacle with bureaucratic collapse and no one is safe.

It’s becoming harder to tell if we’re living in a dark constitutional drama or a badly-scripted satire. Donald Trump’s second term is delivering both, with each day unspooling a fresh absurdity, a new abuse of power, or a chilling lurch toward authoritarianism.

Let’s start with international diplomacy under Trump 2.0. This past weekend, Trump jetted off to Italy for the funeral of Pope Francis, spent all of 14 hours on the ground, squeezed in a 15-minute “peace summit” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky inside St. Peter’s Basilica, and then rushed back to New Jersey… to play golf.

White House aides called the Zelensky meeting “productive,” which is code for “it happened.” Trump’s team later squashed any talk of a follow-up, citing his “very tight schedule.” Translation: he had a tee time, and the sun sets early this time of year. Also possibly at play, his distaste for Europe’s “defense freeloaders,” who had gathered en masse in Rome. One highlight? French President Macron appeared to snub a handshake just before the Zelensky chat, leaving Trump diplomatically ghosted on the Vatican steps.

Notably absent from Trump's itinerary: any meaningful engagement on trade, tariffs, or NATO. While global markets tremble and Ukraine burns, Trump’s top takeaway was a chance to opine on the NFL Draft. Between digs at Putin and dodging foreign policy, he took to Truth Social to demand teams draft Deion Sanders’ son, and then claimed credit when the Cleveland Browns did, four rounds and 120 picks later.

But if that Italy trip felt like an exercise in indifference, Trump’s 100-day interview was a full-blown cry for help, if not from him, then certainly from the nation. In a truly bonkers sit-down with ABC’s Terry Moran, Trump spent an hour ricocheting between denial, delusion, and deflection. He insisted, with full sincerity, that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles, despite clear proof the image was photoshopped. When Moran pointed this out, Trump lashed out: “Terry, I picked you. I never heard of you. Be nice.”

From there, the chaos only grew. Trump claimed tourism is booming, right after being told it’s actually down due to his threats to annex Canada and cavity-search travelers. He defended 145% tariffs on China as a great thing, shrugged off small business devastation with a breezy “Apple’s doing great,” and claimed suffering Americans “did sign up for this.” Apparently, we’re all just extras in Trump’s masochistic reboot of The Apprentice: Global Collapse Edition.

Asked about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has increased federal spending while promising to save trillions Trump waved off the math, declaring they “found a lot of fraud” and made mysterious referrals no one else can locate. The more pressing takeaway? He thinks DOGE is a success because it hurts the people he wants hurt.

And then there was the bit about law firms. Trump casually admitted that he strong-armed some of the most powerful firms in the world into paying him hundreds of millions simply because he didn’t like who they represented. “They signed whatever I put in front of them,” he bragged, like a mob boss bragging about a shakedown over linguine.

Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency continues its wrecking ball tour of Washington. In just 100 days, it has slashed the federal workforce to 1960s levels, gutted longstanding programs like NOAA’s Habitat Conservation and the IRS Direct File initiative, and handed extraordinary control to mysterious twentysomething coders with more access than experience. Government reshaping? More like government liquidation.

But it’s not just policy they’re shredding, it’s accountability. One DOGE operative, Gavin Kliger, was just exposed for holding nearly $400,000 in financial stakes in companies that stand to benefit from the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And, surprise: he was one of the architects of the CFPB layoffs. Conflict of interest? Ethics violation? In the Musk-Trump universe, that’s just “synergy.”

Speaking of synergy, DOGE has also unveiled a sketchy Treasury “payment system” that now requires government vendors to route transactions through an opaque web of Musk-affiliated platforms. Screenshots show internal dashboards riddled with technical bugs and unexplained payments. Treasury officials claim it’s about “efficiency.” It looks more like digital grift in action.

And if you're wondering whether this is all going over smoothly with the public, well, Amazon briefly flirted with honesty before running back to daddy Trump. After quietly rolling out tariff-related price breakdowns on online receipts, a move praised by consumers and economists alike, Jeff Bezos folded like a lawn chair at the first sign of MAGA outrage. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Amazon of committing a “hostile and political act,” which in Trumpworld means “revealing that our policies are actually hurting people.” Within hours, Amazon dropped the feature, vowing not to publicly itemize the cost of Trump’s tariffs.

But not everyone is playing along. Sellers on platforms like TEMU and even some big-box retailers are still showing those line-item “import fees” that trace directly back to the administration’s inflationary trade war. And that’s exactly why Trump hates it, it ruins his favorite trick: blaming Biden for everything from eggs to EVs. When the price tag spells out “import fee” in black and white, it’s a lot harder to pin it on the last guy. The truth, it seems, is now a partisan issue unless you're buying socks from a Chinese wholesaler with a more honest checkout page than the federal government.

Trump, for his part, is still working overtime to obscure that reality. After a week of economic whiplash, the administration announced it's scaling back auto tariffs, but only temporarily, and only in the most convoluted way possible. Instead of calling them rebates (which they essentially are), the White House insists they’re “offsets.” A discount. A loyalty reward. A patriotic surcharge. Call it whatever you want, just don’t admit that voters are footing the bill for Trump’s economic cosplay.

If all that weren’t enough, ICE agents in Virginia delivered another reminder of the state’s descent into authoritarian theater. They stormed a courthouse in balaclavas, no warrants, no badges, and no IDs, just vibes and threats, dragging a man out and assaulting bystanders who dared ask for proof of authority. Local officials say they were blindsided. The rest of us are simply appalled.

But that wasn’t an isolated incident. In Oklahoma City, a family of U.S. citizens, three young daughters and their mother, recently relocated from Maryland, were awakened at gunpoint by federal agents who stormed their home, tore it apart, and seized their belongings in what appears to have been a catastrophic case of mistaken identity. The agents wore insignia for ICE, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals. They offered no clear explanation, no business cards, no contact information. They forced the women and girls outside, half-dressed, into the rain, and left them without their phones, electronics, or even the family’s cash, because someone else’s mail was still arriving at the property.

And now? No one will admit who did it. The U.S. Marshals deny involvement. The FBI initially said they assisted, then backpedaled and claimed they weren’t there at all. Homeland Security has gone silent. The government came crashing through the door, terrorized a family, confiscated their property, and then vanished into bureaucratic smoke.

The mother, identified only as Marissa, described the trauma in simple terms: “We bleed too.” And that’s the ugly truth the Trump administration has tried to obscure, this isn’t just about immigration. The system of cruelty and lawlessness being normalized isn’t stopping at the border. It’s seeping into every corner of the country, and citizenship is no longer a shield. Under Trump, due process is optional. Transparency is nonexistent. And the people enforcing these policies are unaccountable, anonymous, and armed.

So there you have it: federal judges are arrested, due process is optional, tariffs are truth-optional, DOGE is running the government like a broken start-up, ICE is dressing like cartel enforcers, and the president of the United States is talking about MS-13 tattoos that don’t exist and claiming vindication in football drafts. Somewhere, in the background, the Constitution is weeping into its parchment.