Fear, Fraud, and Fort Bragg: Dispatches from a Country on the Brink

ICE raids haunt graduations, tax cuts mask looting, and Trump’s Black Hawk gospel thunders over Los Angeles, but coal miners just won a round, and that’s no small thing.

Good morning. In Los Angeles, graduations are now held under the silent menace of black-windowed SUVs and whispered warnings on the Ice Block app. Middle schoolers in pressed shirts and floral leis were shuffled in early and herded off campus before ICE could make an appearance, not because of any confirmed threat, but because the fear is now a permanent fixture. One ceremony in Carson moved its start time up by 30 minutes to avoid agents seen loitering near schools. In Gardena, parents got alerts mid-ceremony warning of nearby raids. This is the climate in L.A. now, one where deportation is as likely as a diploma, where even U.S. citizens are afraid to attend their child’s big day.

Trump, of course, calls it “order.” At Fort Bragg, he boasted that the streets of Los Angeles were being saved from “foreign invaders” and vowed that the only flag that would fly there would be the American one, “so help me God.” He praised the ICE raids as a righteous stand against “third world lawlessness,” claiming, “we stopped that sucker, didn’t we?” This so-called “liberation” has included the arrest and deportation of a 9-year-old and the public abduction of street vendors by armed agents in plainclothes, operating without identification, scenes more reminiscent of a military junta than a functioning democracy. Thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines now patrol L.A. under his orders, in what local officials are calling an “enforcement blitz” and residents are calling terror. Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have both demanded the raids stop, but the only thing louder than their outrage is the silence echoing from the Oval Office, or perhaps the sound of artillery fire Trump described so fondly: “the thunderous boom,” he said, “the chilling howl of Black Hawks in the dead of night.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are making sure no one forgets to smile through the chaos. In a move ripped straight from the George W. Bush “please love us” playbook, the GOP has jammed $200 billion in new tax cuts into their latest domestic megabill. The idea is simple: toss out enough retroactive refunds and targeted gimmicks, a deduction for auto loan interest (but only if your car was assembled in the U.S.!), $4,000 off for seniors, tax-free tips, and maybe voters won’t notice that Medicaid is being bled out behind the curtain. It’s a full-on bribe buffet, where the top 1% walks away with four grand in SALT savings and the working poor are tossed a $250 tax cut and told to clap.

Notably absent from this “economic miracle” is any sense of fiscal discipline. The same party that once warned of debt ceilings and inflation is now fine with blowing up the budget if it means turbocharging refund checks before the midterms. It’s a stimulus, but make it cynical trickle-down economics, seasoned with populist rhetoric and turbocharged by IRS chaos.

And if you’re wondering how this is all being funded? Don’t worry, they’ve got it covered. The Trump administration is trying to strip the CDC, OSHA, and mine safety inspectors for parts. Well they were, until they ran into a rare buzzsaw: actual coal miners.

In what may be the first recorded instance of Trump hearing “No” and retreating, coal miners and their advocates have successfully blocked plans to close over 30 Mine Safety and Health Administration field offices and gut black lung protections by 90%. This wasn’t a polite lobbying campaign. This was lawsuits, street protests, and letters from both West Virginia Republicans and Virginia Democrats saying, essentially: You can’t praise miners onstage while letting them die in silence underground.

To be clear, coal is still a dreadful, doomed energy source. But even miners know that if you dig it up, you shouldn’t have to cough your lungs out doing it. The reversal was quiet, no tweetstorm, no “mission accomplished” banner, but MSHA closures were pulled from the list, and hundreds of occupational health workers have been quietly reinstated. The silica rule, which would finally set a modern standard for exposure, remains stuck in bureaucratic limbo. But the message is clear: if Trump can be dragged back from the brink by a chorus of coughing miners, maybe not all is lost.

Elsewhere in the swirling dust cloud of dysfunction, the scandal over Trump’s private Air Force One project is picking up speed, even if the jet itself may not. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flatly refused to tell Congress how much it will cost to retrofit a Qatari luxury jet into the new presidential aircraft. He won’t say how long it will take either. What he did say was that it’s “worth it.” For whom? Well, that’s still classified. But the public can rest assured: nothing says “America First” like outsourcing our presidential fleet to a Gulf monarchy.

Hegseth didn’t fly away unscathed. During a Senate Appropriations hearing, he caught fire from all sides, Mitch McConnell slammed the administration for a flat defense budget while Lindsey Graham expressed his usual war-lusting disappointment in Trump’s cuddly stance toward Russia. Lisa Murkowski questioned the Arctic strategy. And Susan Collins chided the Pentagon’s glacial pace in sharing budget details. The tension wasn’t just partisan. It was structural, an administration that hides more than it governs, now colliding with senators who are realizing they’ve been locked out of their own sandbox.

And the global stage isn’t buying the act either. According to new Pew polling, U.S. favorability has dropped in 15 of the 24 countries surveyed since Trump returned to power. Our leadership on Ukraine, Gaza, climate, and immigration? Universally panned. Trump received his worst marks in Mexico, where 91% of respondents disapprove of him. Turns out, when you spend years calling your neighbors criminals and rapists, they remember.

But back on the home front, at least we’re keeping the CDC guessing. After firing over 450 public health workers during an administrative “reorg,” the Trump administration is now... re-hiring them. That’s right, cruise ship inspectors, STI prevention experts, and global health officers are back on the job just months after being shown the door. Why? Because it turns out you can’t run a public health system on vibes and Elon memes. Who knew?

Speaking of things you shouldn’t inhale, Monsanto’s Roundup scandal just got darker. A new More Perfect Union investigation highlights whistleblower testimony and internal documents showing the long-known risks of glyphosate, the pesticide once sold as the miracle weed killer, now known for giving people cancer. After acquiring Monsanto, Bayer, a German pharmaceutical giant, inherited not just the product but the legal firestorm, and has doubled down on efforts to keep glyphosate on the market, despite mounting verdicts, billions in settlements, and a global scientific consensus about its dangers. And yes, it’s still approved by the EPA, thanks to a decades-long bromance between regulators and the corporations they’re supposed to watchdog. If you’re wondering why Americans have to crowdsource their own health protections, look no further than this literal poison pipeline from boardroom to bloodstream.

And finally, for anyone still clinging to the fantasy that climate change will be a slow, polite problem: scientists say the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the vast ocean current system that keeps parts of the world temperate, may collapse this century. If it does, the fallout won’t just be academic. Winter temperatures could plunge to -55°F in parts of Norway, -35°F in Montreal, and -20°F in Boston, turning once-livable cities into deep-freeze outposts. The collapse would throw global agriculture into chaos, displace millions, and make Game of Thrones look like a documentary with unusually good costuming. The irony? This chilling warning arrives just as fossil fuel giants lobby for expanded drilling in the Arctic and the U.S. doubles down on energy “dominance”, not responsibility.

So yes, the world is on fire, or freezing, or poisoned, or being surveilled by DHS agents outside your child’s middle school. But in the hills of Appalachia, a miner just won a fight to keep his black lung screening. And sometimes, in a country this determined to bury itself alive, a shovel down is still a hand up.

See you all on Saturday!