Fear, Fire, and Ice

While Trump’s cruelty machine grinds on, billionaires party, Congress capitulates, and Greenland’s ice prepares to drown us all.

Good morning! Donald Trump wants you to believe America is under siege from Canadian “invaders,” federal judges who read the Constitution, working-class parents asking to keep Medicaid, and the audacity of the poor daring to stay alive. But if you watched yesterday’s chaos, it’s clear the real siege is happening inside Trump’s hairspray-clogged skull, spilling out through a government that now exists mostly to stage Fox News hits and funnel money to billionaires.

Former Canadian MP Charlie Angus wasn’t having it yesterday, ripping Christy Noem’s “northern border crisis” clown show to shreds with the precision of a prosecutor and the exhaustion of someone who’s watched America lose its mind in real time. Noem, flanked by Michigan Rep. John James, served up horror stories about El Salvadorian gangs supposedly flooding over the Canadian border to rape and murder Americans, like a B-movie pitch so absurd even Steven Seagal would pass it up for being “too unrealistic.” Angus called it what it is: kidnapping. Noem’s DHS is seizing Canadian citizens, holding them in ICE cages, ignoring medical conditions, and letting them die while grandstanding about phantom threats to “American safety.” Again, it appears the abject cruelty is the point, designed to gin up fear and feed the base while ignoring the crises Americans actually face, crumbling wages, lost healthcare, housing they can’t afford, and the billionaire ruling class looting what’s left of the country while everyone’s distracted by border PowerPoints and blood-and-soil speeches.

Meanwhile, Trump waddled out for a SCOTUS victory lap like a reality TV host crashing a funeral, calling the Court’s decision against nationwide injunctions a “monumental win.” Translation: the Supreme Court has decided the president can do whatever he wants unless every single judge in America manages to stop him simultaneously, a scenario about as likely as Trump turning down a cheeseburger or finishing a sentence without lying. He rambled about “historic mandates” and “radical left judges” trying to “overrule the rightful powers of the president,” ignoring the fact that he was elected by a minority of voters and is currently polling lower than the U.S. Postal Service’s lost package hotline. It’s a “win” for the presidency, sure, if your definition of “presidency” is a one-man carnival where the executive branch moonlights as a smash-and-grab operation, held together by screaming press conferences, Fox News chyrons, and the scent of cold McDonald’s fries.The Senate had a chance to put a leash on this circus, and predictably refused. They voted 47-53 to reject limits on Trump’s war powers in Iran, days after he bombed nuclear sites, shredded a fragile cease-fire, and threatened the Ayatollah like a drunk uncle who just discovered Truth Social’s ALL CAPS button. Remember when Congress used to pretend to care about declaring wars? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

On the domestic front, Trump and Senate Republicans rolled out a $4.2 trillion tax cut bill, aiming to pass it by July 4 so they can celebrate “Independence Day” by making Americans even more dependent on GoFundMe for insulin. The bill slashes Medicaid, phases out renewable energy credits, and butchers safety-net programs so billionaires can stuff even more cash into their Cayman Islands vaults. Need a visual? While they gut your healthcare, Jeff Bezos is literally renting out half of Vienna for his wedding, flying in guests on private jets to a city draped in rented opulence, while the people picking Amazon packages off warehouse belts back home ration inhalers and pray they don’t get sick. The only “compromise” in this bill? A SALT deduction bump so rich donors can write off the property taxes on their third mansion while telling you to bootstrap harder. God Bless America, LLC.

Meanwhile, the Trump economy is rotting under the gold spray paint. Inflation spiked (2.7%), incomes fell, GDP shrank, and consumer spending dropped. Trump’s response? Threaten to tariff Canada while begging China to keep rare-earth minerals flowing so your iPhone still works. The S&P hit a record high because Wall Street has the attention span of a ferret on Adderall, but if you look past the confetti, everyday Americans are paying for this “winning.”

California’s Gavin Newsom put it plainly: this isn’t a budget, it’s a “Murder Bill.” If passed, it will rip healthcare away from 15 million Americans, gut Medicaid, slash housing and rental assistance, and strip food support from millions of families, including children, veterans, and the elderly. Reproductive care? Gone in half the states, with funding bans tied to this bill that force clinics to shutter overnight. It slashes funding for heating assistance, child nutrition, and maternal health while funneling trillions in tax cuts to billionaires who don’t need another yacht or a rented European capital for their next wedding. Rural hospitals will close. Disabled Americans will lose in-home care. Parents will watch grocery and pharmacy bills climb while their safety net is torched for the sake of a talking point on Fox. This is a hit job in spreadsheet form, all so Trump can claim “historic tax cuts” while people are left to die in the world’s richest country.

And the cruelty machine keeps grinding. Look at the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga: deported by mistake in a bureaucratic blunder so blatant even Trump’s ICE couldn’t spin it, dragged back under public pressure only to be slapped with a bogus conspiracy case in Tennessee for giving a ride to people the state claims he might have known were undocumented. Former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Harry Litman called it what it is: pettiness turned into policy. Trump’s DHS is so desperate to prove it’s “tough on crime” that it’s manufacturing crime, wasting taxpayer money to punish a man for their own error because letting him live a normal life would make them look weak. In Trump’s America, the law isn’t about justice; it’s a reminder that the regime can destroy your life on a whim if you step out of line, or even if you don’t. This is all about power, and about proving they can kidnap you, charge you, and break you just to make a point.

And while Trump’s regime cannibalizes the poor to feed billionaire tax cuts and fuels spectacle to distract from cruelty, the planet is quite literally melting beneath us.

A new Greenland Ice Sheet study warns that the world’s second-largest ice sheet is far more vulnerable than we’ve been told. Scientists drilling through ancient ice found fractures deep below the surface, channels where warming waters are eating away at the base, and pressure cracks that could accelerate collapse. If (or when) it goes, it will drown coastal cities worldwide, displacing hundreds of millions, destroying trillions in property, and redrawing coastlines in real time. Miami, New York, Lagos, Mumbai, gone, or battered by saltwater incursions that never recede.

The ice doesn’t care about Trump’s polling or the petty cruelty of his deportation machine. It doesn’t care about Jeff Bezos renting out Vienna while people ration insulin. It doesn’t care about “Murder Bills” or Fox News chyrons. It melts because physics demands it, and it will keep melting unless we stop treating the planet as a sacrifice zone for the rich.

It is a reminder that while the regime distracts us with fearmongering, scapegoating, and spectacles of cruelty, the real crisis is here, creeping, cracking, and flooding the edges of our world, demanding the kind of collective action billionaires and authoritarians will never give us voluntarily. If we want a future where people can live with dignity, we will have to take it, together, before the water rises. Carpe Momentum!