"He Came to Kill the Kids": War Abroad, Raids at Home, and the President Who Built a Ballroom

Trump’s America is a theater of cruelty where the only thing rising faster than ICE raids and fossil fuels is the ceiling of his new ballroom.

Good morning! Donald Trump, in his ongoing audition to be remembered as the most unserious man in serious times, spent part of this week comparing the war in Ukraine to “two kids fighting in a park.” President Zelensky, whose country is being shelled by a nuclear power while begging the West for ceasefire support, was not amused.

“We are not kids with Putin at the playground,” Zelensky told ABC. “He is a murderer who came to this park to kill the kids.” But sure, Mr. President, tell us more about your military parade. After all, Reagan National Airport is shutting down on June 14 so Trump can LARP as Supreme Commander for his birthday while actual soldiers die in Ukraine, Lithuania, and New Mexico without a presidential mention.

As Ukrainian fathers bury their children, Trump suggests letting them “fight for a while.” Less diplomacy, more sadism dressed up as detachment.

And then there’s Kilmar Abrego García, the asylum seeker Trump vowed never to allow back, even after the Supreme Court ordered his release from the U.S.-funded Secot detention facility in El Salvador. On Friday, the administration finally complied with the court order and facilitated his return. But within hours, Abrego García was hit with a sudden indictment in Tennessee, accusing him of conspiring to bring other migrants into the country. The charges make no mention of the child trafficking or terrorism claims that Trump and Pam Bondi loudly insinuated in public. It’s a classic face-saving maneuver: invent a boogeyman, defy a court order, lose in court, and then retroactively charge the target with whatever will play best on Newsmax. The stunt was so blatant that Ben Shrader, former chief of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville, and a career official who served under Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again, resigned in protest, posting his resignation letter publicly. When a federal prosecutor with 15 years of experience walks out the door over a case, the public ought to pay attention. Especially when the case is built to disguise defeat as strength.

While ICE raids escalate across Los Angeles, Memphis, and Massachusetts, targeting courthouses, construction sites, and even Home Depot, Donald Trump has his mind on more opulent matters: a ballroom at the White House. He claims it’s the fulfillment of a 150-year dream only he had the guts, or delusion, to realize. In truth, it’s the architectural equivalent of his presidency, gaudy, self-indulgent, and utterly disconnected from the suffering outside its walls.

And as economist Jeffrey Sachs put it recently, the Trump era isn’t just about poor policy, it’s about the systemic decay of public purpose itself. Sachs warned Trump has “turned the instruments of governance into tools of self-enrichment and spectacle,” replacing service with branding, evidence with performance. The ballroom fits perfectly. Rather than diplomacy, it’s about backdrop. Instead of function, it’s about ego. The country may be unraveling, but the chandelier budget is holding strong.

“This is not a government,” Sachs said. “It’s a vanity machine operated by a man who thinks every crisis is a marketing opportunity and every institution is a prop.”

That’s what the ballroom is: a stage set for the closing act of empire. A place to host donors, court billionaires, and pose for presidential portraits while the foundation rots from the inside. Sachs warned that if America continues to confuse celebrity with leadership, it will find itself with gilded ceilings and collapsing floors.

The irony, of course, is that this new ballroom may be built on the very grounds where climate data used to be stored, where scientists once worked, where programs for the public once lived—before Trump gutted them. The space now earmarked for golden chandeliers and donor galas was once home to climate modelers, public health planners, and energy analysts working to prevent catastrophe, not host it. These were the offices where federal scientists tracked wildfire spread, monitored air quality, and modeled the future of coastal cities. Trump wants to replace them with velvet ropes, vaporware press releases, and his fantasy that history will remember him for marble rather than methane. If there’s any floor polishing happening now, it’s not to shine up government transparency, it’s to buff the stage before the next act of authoritarian showmanship. A monument to delusion.

And why stop there? Trump also reposted Jeffrey Epstein’s former criminal defense attorney, who reassured America that Epstein “had no information to hurt President Trump” because he asked him directly. A bold PR strategy, “Don’t worry, I asked the pedophile”, and somehow not the most disturbing post of the week.

That honor may go to Elon Musk, who, amid the wreckage of Tesla’s worst week on record, decided to go full mask-off with a post celebrating “anti-empathy.” In response to a video criticizing a congressional candidate for defending healthcare for undocumented immigrants, Musk added a target emoji. Compassion is weakness, empathy is suicidal, and anyone who questions that is now a woke socialist threat to civilization. The man who made billions off government subsidies now declares mercy unaffordable.

Meanwhile, one of the strangest new entries in the Trump–Musk drama is Katie Miller, former White House aide, wife of Stephen Miller, and self-branded “YOLO” tattoo enthusiast. According to The Wall Street Journal, she quietly worked for Trump, Musk, and private clients all at once, blurring lines like a Jackson Pollock painting soaked in cronyism. She followed Musk out of the White House last week and is now advising him full time, despite being the source of numerous internal miscommunications, including the false claim that the U.S. sent $50 million in condoms to Gaza. Just your average day at DOGE.

Speaking of dysfunction, let’s talk jobs. The June report quietly revised away 92,000 jobs from the past two months. Manufacturing lost another 8,000. And despite Trump’s bluster about striking deals with 90 countries, there are still zero signed trade agreements, not one. Instead, Trump’s former trade advisor Peter Navarro appeared on Fox Business and compared the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to a deli counter. Yes, really. You walk in, take a number, and wait your turn to negotiate with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and USTR chair Jamieson Greer. No strategy, no vision, just a bureaucratic farce with plastic gloves and a slicer. America: where economic collapse now gets in line behind cold cuts.

Monro Inc., one of the country’s largest auto service chains, is closing 145 stores after hemorrhaging $5.2 million in annual losses. CEO Peter Fitzsimmons blamed, among other things, “mitigating tariff risk”, proving once again that Trump’s 25% import levies are quietly torching the retail and service sectors along with everything else.

Overseas, real leadership is emerging where it counts. At this week’s Ramstein meeting, France announced a “win-win partnership” to manufacture drones in Ukraine, with all engineering by Ukrainians. Other NATO allies are offering to host Ukrainian factories on their soil and fund the production entirely. The Electronic Warfare Coalition expanded again. And Volodymyr Zelensky, while rebuking Trump’s grotesque analogies, called for ramping up Ukraine’s defense industrial capacity to $35 billion, nearly triple its current funding.

But if you’re hoping for actual resistance to Trump’s climate sabotage here at home, look to the kids. Twenty-two young Americans, ages 7 to 25, have sued the president, his Cabinet, and multiple federal agencies in Lighthiser v. Trump, arguing that his fossil fuel executive orders violate their Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty.

“Trump’s fossil fuel orders are a death sentence for my generation,” said lead plaintiff Eva Lighthiser. “He’s waging war on us with fossil fuels as his weapon, and we’re fighting back with the Constitution.”

They’ve already won in Montana and Hawai‘i. Now they’re taking the lessons from Juliana v. United States and trying again, narrower in scope, but no less righteous. As the Trump administration rolls back clean energy and buries climate science, these youth plaintiffs are standing in the breach, demanding recognition not of a hypothetical future, but of the poisoned air they’re already breathing.

So yes, Trump may be busy building monuments to himself. But the kids? They’re building precedent.