Ghosts in the Transcript, Ghosts in the Machine

Trump at a podium dissolving into static, a courtroom gavel wrapped in circuit board wiring, and a tearful soldier stepping off a bus, three Americas colliding.

Good morning! There was a time when presidents spoke, and the record stood. No longer. In 2025, the White House press office has become less of a historical archive and more of a selective memory machine, editing, cropping, and disappearing Trump’s own words as though we haven’t all seen the video already. This week, the latest casualty of Trumpian revisionism is his deranged West Point commencement address. Once available on WhiteHouse.gov, the full transcript has quietly vanished, replaced by a sanitized YouTube version with the coherence stitched together like a bad facelift. Gone are the bits about shark-ravaged soldiers and the part where he praised a general’s daughter with a tone more befitting a car salesman than a commander-in-chief.

But the real story isn’t what he said, it’s what no one else did. No aide stopped him. No speechwriter intervened. No inner-circle loyalist pulled him off stage. That’s because they don’t need him to sound presidential. They just need him to keep breaking things. In this stage of the game, Trump isn’t the movement, he’s the smokescreen. The flaming figurehead. The man who draws fire while the real operatives, Thiel, Musk, Vance, and Vought, go to work dismantling civil service protections, replacing oversight with obedience, and pushing through the most brazen redistribution of wealth in modern American history under the Orwellian title of the Big Beautiful Bill.

And if Trump’s West Point ramblings weren’t embarrassing enough, we’ve also got the latest Putin Playback scandal. According to credible reporting and Kremlin leaks, Trump parroted Putin’s private talking points almost verbatim after their phone call last week. Mere hours later, Russian forces launched a fresh round of drone attacks on Ukrainian territory, including strategic infrastructure sites. It's a diplomatic horror show dressed in a golf shirt, and once again, no one in his own administration is willing, or allowed, to question who’s really writing the script.

Meanwhile, back home, the FDA has decided it’s time to update the fall COVID vaccine to match the dominant LP.8.1 strain, currently responsible for nearly 75% of U.S. cases. But due to Trump's budget gutting of public health infrastructure, the new vaccine may only be available to “the most at-risk,” which, in the Trumpian lexicon, often translates to “donors and generals.” Everyone else? Grab a vitamin and cross your fingers.

And then there’s The Big Beautiful Bill, a name so ridiculous it may as well have been cooked up by a marketing intern hopped up on Red Bull and Reaganomics. The bill passed the House on May 22 to thunderous applause from the Trump faithful, who sold it as a growth engine while quietly slashing Medicaid, food assistance, education, housing, and environmental safeguards. The richest Americans walk away with tax cuts so deep they’re practically subsidies for wealth hoarding, while the rest of the country gets told to "bootstrap harder." Chomsky didn’t write the bill, but he predicted it decades ago. The consolidation of wealth. The destruction of social contracts. The weaponization of crisis to lock in permanent inequality. This isn’t reform. It’s class warfare wrapped in bunting and sold with a slogan.

But not all news this weekend is bleak. In a rare act of diplomacy, Ukraine and Russia completed their largest prisoner exchange of the war. Over three days, 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers returned home, many of them in visible shock, some in tears, all of them survivors of captivity in a conflict Trump keeps treating like a real estate deal gone cold. These soldiers come home to families, to grief, to rebuilding, while their supposed ally in Washington flirts with their enemy on speakerphone.

And finally, we arrive in Alabama, where horror and farce often walk hand in hand. Frankie Johnson, an incarcerated man stabbed roughly 20 times across multiple incidents, including while handcuffed, filed suit against the state for negligence and corruption. In response, the state’s million-dollar defense team at Butler Snow… used ChatGPT to fabricate case law. Yes, really. Cited four completely imaginary cases in a legal filing, one of which turned out to be a 1939 speeding ticket. All in the service of defending a prison system that the Trump DOJ itself once called unconstitutional.

The judge, to her credit, wasn’t having it. Sanctions are likely. But what remains is a chilling portrait of where we are: a place where public resources fund fake law to excuse real violence, and where AI becomes not a tool for justice but a smokescreen for brutality.

They call it modernization. Chomsky calls it manufacturing consent. And we might just call it what it is: democracy, if we let it, being quietly strangled by the very technologies and institutions that once promised to defend it.

And yet, somehow, he endures. Despite vanishing transcripts, fake citations, Putin parroting, and a legislative agenda that reads like a billionaire’s Christmas list, Donald Trump’s approval rating remains stubbornly buoyant, hovering between 45% and 47% depending on the poll. Disapproval still outweighs approval, but not by much.

The latest New York Times average puts him at 45% approval and 51% disapproval. Silver Bulletin is slightly more generous. RealClearPolitics, even more so. Gallup says he peaked at 49%. If you cause enough chaos, people stop measuring the fire and just admire the light.

He began his second term underwater and has remained there, treading political molasses. And yet here he is, lecturing Walmart to “eat the tariffs,” spewing conspiracy theories about South Africa to foreign heads of state, and branding a bill that disembowels the safety net as “Big and Beautiful”, all while half the country watches and shrugs.

Maybe that’s the most dangerous development of all: not that Trump still believes his own delusions, but that millions of Americans are willing to pretend along with him.