Full Self-Drive Toward the Abyss

As America’s institutions swerve into oncoming traffic, Trump rewrites science, diplomacy, law, and even the Epstein saga, with all the stability of a Molotov cocktail sommelier.

Good morning! If there is a single theme running through today’s news, it’s that every institution you once imagined had guardrails is now behaving like a Tesla on Full Self-Drive: confident, delusional, and accelerating toward a flaming guardrail it insists isn’t there.

We begin with the Trump administration’s late-night victory lap over the Epstein Files Bill, which Donald Trump has now signed as though it were his idea all along. After House Democrats forced the vote through a discharge petition, while Speaker Mike Johnson played procedural hopscotch and temporarily pretended Rep. Adelita Grijalva didn’t exist, Trump abruptly switched course, declared himself the patron saint of transparency, and signed the bill on Wednesday. Pam Bondi now has 30 days to release the files. Thirty days to reveal what’s been buried, what’s been sanitized, and what’s been politically embalmed since the first Epstein scandal began leaking through American public life like a cracked septic tank.

The law requires searchable, downloadable files, flight logs, memos, immunity agreements, metadata, plus a mandatory explanation of whatever Bondi chooses to hide. And because Trump can never resist turning governance into a livestreamed cage match, he immediately announced that the release would expose Democrats, conveniently ignoring his own decade-long Palm Beach proximity to the world’s most infamous child trafficker. It’s an impressive feat of projection: imagine someone hurling a Molotov cocktail through a window and then pointing at a passerby sipping hot tea and yelling, “There! That’s your culprit!”

If the administration’s approach to transparency is unmoored, its approach to scientific truth has officially been duct-taped to RFK Jr.’s chakras. In one of the bleakest developments yet from the newly “reimagined” CDC, the agency quietly rewrote its longstanding page debunking the myth that vaccines cause autism. Gone is the clear, evidence-backed language. In its place is a passive-aggressive shiver of bureaucratese claiming that the statement “vaccines do not cause autism” is somehow not evidence-based, a position so scientifically absurd it would have embarrassed Jenny McCarthy in 2007.

Twenty-five years of studies? The 1.2 million-child Danish analysis? The National Academy of Medicine review? All brushed aside in favor of a narrative that aluminum adjuvants “could” be to blame and that previous CDC messaging violated the Data Quality Act, a statute that anti-vaccine activists invoke with the fervor of a cult member who found a loophole in the cosmic bylaws. HHS Secretary Kennedy, who swore during his confirmation that he would not touch this language, now stands atop the rubble of his own assurance while his agency puts an asterisk next to “Vaccines do not cause autism” like it’s a baseball statistic from the steroid era.

On the global stage, Trump is treating Ukraine as though it were a distressed property he intends to flip for personal credit. In the latest leak, the Trump administration’s “peace plan”, drafted by real-estate mogul turned diplomatic dilettante Steve Witkoff, turns out to be less a negotiation framework and more a Russian surrender demand with the vowels rearranged. Ukraine would have to cede every occupied territory, plus additional land Russia hasn’t even managed to seize. It would have to cut its military in half, surrender long-range weapons, and ban foreign troop support. Russia, for its part, would have to… continue existing.

Europe, unsurprisingly, is livid. France warned, with unusual bluntness, that “peace cannot be capitulation.” Poland declared it had not been consulted, a shocking admission given that the continent bearing the brunt of the war apparently learned of Trump’s “plan” the same way the public did: from news alerts and the sound of Brussels officials shouting into their coffee.

Ukraine calls the proposal what it is: unconditional surrender. One adviser flatly said it “duplicates Russia’s 2022 demands.” And yet here we are, with the Trump administration pressure-testing Kyiv’s breaking point while Russia bombs Ternopil, killing 26 civilians. including three children, far from the front lines. Entire apartment blocks are gone. Chlorine levels in the air hit six times normal. Families are digging through rubble for the missing while Washington floats a peace plan designed to reward the aggressor and disarm the victim.

And then there is the story that chills the bones even further: the United States is now killing people at sea under a legal theory so thin that military lawyers are staging a quiet revolt.

NBC News reports that the top JAG at U.S. Southern Command warned that Trump’s new campaign of airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats could constitute extrajudicial killings. He was overruled. Strikes proceeded anyway. Since September, 82 people have been killed in 21 strikes, without evidence, without congressional authorization, and without legal justification recognizable under either U.S. or international law. The administration has invented a new category of warfare, “armed conflict with drug cartels”, which, according to actual lawyers, is not a thing.

When John Yoo, architect of the Bush torture memos, is warning the administration that it has crossed a line between crime-fighting and war, you should stop and take stock of where we are. Even Yoo is like: “I love a creative legal interpretation, but guys. Come on.”

This is how democracies die: not with a bang, but with a heavily edited CDC webpage, a coerced Ukrainian surrender, a kill list in the Caribbean, and a president boasting that the Epstein files will incriminate his enemies while the spotlight inches closer to him.

Marz and I are seizing the brief mercy of a break in the rain to wander the river path before the real deluge rolls in, both from the sky and from whatever fresh madness the White House is about to unleash. If nothing else, the dog will get his sniff-and-stroll in before the storm hits, and I’ll return fortified for the next wave of breaking news, constitutional crises, and government-sanctioned absurdity. Stay dry out there, meteorologically and democratically.