From D.C. to Alaska: Trump’s Blueprint for Chaos

Federal takeovers, foreign policy faceplants, DOJ purges, and tech-bro meltdowns all in one sweltering, chart-waving morning.

Good morning! It took thirty-five minutes, a sweltering, overcrowded room, and the collective willpower of dozens of reporters to not faint from heatstroke before Donald Trump finally emerged for his grand D.C. “crime and homelessness” announcement, a spectacle that looked less like a policy rollout and more like a Fox News Christmas card.

Flanked by Pam Bondi (double-necklaced, with a gold cross positioned like a moral permission slip), Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Jeannine Pirro, each nodding in synchronized approval like animatronics at a MAGA theme park, Trump declared that Washington, D.C. was no longer under local control. Invoking Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, he announced he was placing the Metropolitan Police Department under federal command and handing operational oversight to none other than Bondi, whose résumé already includes purging the DOJ of inconvenient prosecutors. The National Guard, 800 troops to start, will be deployed on “night patrols” alongside FBI agents to “re-establish law and order.”

And in case you thought this was about actual crime rates, Mayor Muriel Bowser was quick to remind everyone that violent crime in the capital is at a thirty-year low. But facts don’t photograph well, so Trump came armed with charts stripped of context and a scattershot of dog whistles: promises to “eliminate slums,” scrap sanctuary cities, and remove the homeless from underpasses and “relocate them far from the capital”, a phrase that manages to be both vague and ominous.

Then came the campaign-ready one-liner: “You spit, we hit, and they get hit real hard.” Somewhere in the back, you could almost hear Lee Atwater slow-clapping.

Between grievances, Trump wandered into his greatest hits set list, “men playing in women’s sports,” the “disaster” of cashless bail, and the obligatory self-pity over not yet having a Nobel Peace Prize. As he spoke, Bondi and Hegseth scanned the crowd like Secret Service for ideological purity, Patel stood at parade rest, and Pirro’s glassy gaze suggested she was already crafting the chyron for tonight’s segment.

In a Freudian flourish, Trump even tripped over his own Putin diplomacy, referring to his upcoming meeting in Alaska as “going to Russia.” For Vladimir, this was likely the only honest moment of the morning, the rest was performance art in the service of precedent-setting federal overreach. The subtext wasn’t subtle: D.C. is just the pilot project. Trump alluded to taking this “model” to other cities, particularly those with sanctuary policies, dressing the threat in the language of public safety while salivating over the political theater of it all.

And if you thought the foreign policy arm of this White House was any more competent, MeidasTouch has you covered. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, a real estate buddy with less diplomatic experience than a mid-level hotel concierge, apparently “misunderstood” Putin when he demanded Ukraine surrender key defensive territory. Witkoff somehow thought Putin was offering to return it.

European leaders were so alarmed they staged an intervention in the UK, cornering JD Vance at Chevening and making it crystal clear that no backroom Alaska land-swap would happen without Ukraine and Europe in the room. French president Emmanuel Macron spelled it out: “Ukraine’s future cannot be decided without the Ukrainians… Europeans will also necessarily be a part of the solution as their own security is at stake.” German chancellor Friedrich Merz was blunter: “We cannot accept that territorial issues between Russia and America are decided over the heads of Europeans and Ukrainians… there can be no peace that rewards Russian aggression.”

In other words, the adults in the room had to explain to Trumpworld that you don’t just hand an active war zone over to the aggressor because your buddy Vladimir promises a photo op in Alaska, a location dripping with Russian propaganda value thanks to the long-running myth that it still belongs to Moscow. And yet, here we are, with Putin set to strut onto U.S. soil like he’s reclaiming lost property, while Trump readies the welcome mat. The “Art of the Deal” has officially become “Oops, I gave away your country by accident.”

Back home, the Trump purge machine keeps humming. Federal prosecutor Mike Gordon wasn’t just another DOJ staff attorney, he was a career litigator with a track record of taking on big, messy cases and winning. In the weeks before his firing, Gordon had secured an indictment against Florida businessman Leo Govoni, accused of stealing $100 million from a fund for children with special needs, and he’d been a key figure in prosecuting high-profile January 6 rioters. His bosses gave him the highest possible performance rating, “outstanding”, and judges trusted him enough to argue for defendants like Govoni to be held without bail, a request the court granted.

On June 27, Gordon was having one of the best weeks of his career: a press conference announcing the Govoni indictment on Monday, a glowing performance review on Wednesday, and a court win keeping Govoni locked up on Thursday. By Friday afternoon, Pam Bondi’s office assistant was at his door with a pink slip. No reason given, no misconduct alleged, just a clean severing of one of the DOJ’s most effective prosecutors.

His apparent crime? Believing that justice applies even to Trump’s allies, donors, or political priorities. In the Bondi-run DOJ, that’s a firing offense. It’s a chilling message to career prosecutors nationwide: serve the facts, and you’re out; serve the boss, and you’re in.

For dessert, a little schadenfreude from Elon Musk’s empire. Tesla has quietly pulled the plug on Dojo, the AI supercomputer Musk once hyped as the “beast” that would usher in full self-driving robo-taxis by… well, whatever year he was promising at the time. The project’s leader is out, top engineers are fleeing to start a competitor, and Tesla will now lean on Nvidia, AMD, and Samsung for AI chips. This collapse comes as Tesla’s robo-taxi rollout in Austin stumbles, Autopilot lawsuits pile up, and executives bail like rats from a very expensive, very electric ship. But sure, Elon, tell us again about Mars.

By the time Trump wrapped his rambling, Nobel-hungry, slum-busting, sanctuary-city-bashing monologue, with detours into moving water from northern to southern California as if geography and hydrology were just “suggestions,” and other greatest-hits delusions, the reporters in that airless room looked like survivors of a sauna contest. His surrogates were still nodding on cue, and the president himself was basking in the glow of charts, catchphrases, and the fantasy of Nobel gold. The rest of us were left with the real takeaway: this was a blueprint for a federally occupied future, shrink-wrapped in dog whistles, sold as patriotism, and executed with the same bumbling, self-serving incompetence we’re now exporting to both Ukraine and the AI sector.