Heaven, Hoaxes, and Hemorrhage

Texas women die waiting for care, doctors drown in pseudoscience, MAGA Mike hides from the Epstein files, and Trump negotiates with himself.

Good morning! There are tragedies that lay bare the rot of a system, and then there are Texas tragedies. The Dallas Morning News just confirmed what doctors warned years ago: pregnant women are dying preventable deaths because abortion bans have turned routine care into political Russian roulette. Porsha Ngumezi sat in a Houston ER, hemorrhaging grapefruit-sized blood clots, while doctors dithered. Nine hours later she was dead, leaving two boys without their mother. Brenda Yolani Arzu Ramirez, five months pregnant, was left to fester in sepsis until organ failure claimed her life. Both could have been saved by the procedures their doctors refused to perform. Both are now buried, their children raised by grandmothers, because the state of Texas prefers ideology over medicine. And just to make the cruelty complete, Texas isn’t even counting. The maternal mortality review board decided it wouldn’t bother investigating deaths from 2022 and 2023. If you don’t count the bodies, after all, they can’t be used against you.

Doctors aren’t just fighting sepsis and hemorrhage; they’re fighting Facebook, Telegram, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. NBC reports that 61% of physicians now routinely see patients poisoned by misinformation, while 86% say it’s gotten worse in the last five years. One surgeon recounted a patient who refused a Covid test before surgery because they’d been convinced the virus wasn’t real. This is the new frontline of medicine: arguing with conspiracies while the clock runs out. And it’s not just patients, the disinformation pipeline now runs straight from the Cabinet table. Kennedy, the nation’s top health official, keeps attacking vaccines like he’s auditioning for a YouTube algorithm. Doctors describe it as “frustrating” and “demoralizing,” which is a polite way of saying they’re being forced to watch patients die preventable deaths thanks to political malpractice.

Of course, authoritarian chaos isn’t confined to exam rooms. Trump has imported National Guard troops from six red states into Washington, D.C., federalized the police, and scattered federal agents around like Monopoly pieces. All of it justified by phantom crime waves, crime is actually down from last year, but the dictator cosplay doesn’t work without jackboots on the streets. And when the Senate won’t confirm his handpicked U.S. attorneys, he just installs them “temporarily” and then overrules judges who try to stop him. Who needs checks and balances when you can just void the courts?

Not that voids are limited to the judiciary. The IRS commissioner’s chair is revolving so fast it could power a small wind farm. Billy Long, professional auctioneer, MAGA loyalist, and briefly the shortest-serving IRS commissioner in history, flamed out after refusing to illegally hand over taxpayer data to track immigrants. Imagine being fired from Trump’s IRS not because you’re a clown who auctions off your tie at conventions, but because you remembered for one brief second that the law exists. He’s now off to Iceland, where he hopes to reinvent himself as Ambassador Honorable Auctioneer, conveniently in a country famous for tax havens. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant tightens his grip on the IRS, micromanaging to the point where even Trump’s lackeys find it intolerable. The revenue service is a hollowed-out husk, but rest assured, the MAGA bills keep coming.

On the foreign front, the self-proclaimed dealmaker is once again negotiating with himself. Trump has been selling the idea of a Putin–Zelensky peace summit by the end of August, as if ending a three-and-a-half-year war is no different than cutting the ribbon on a golf course. Axios notes the Kremlin is in no rush, Lavrov insists any summit must be preceded by endless “step by step” talks. Times Radio went further, pointing out the obvious: Zelensky insists on European troops in Ukraine, Putin categorically rejects them, and NATO doesn’t even know what kind of “guarantees” it could offer. Meanwhile Trump can’t decide if Ukraine is Europe’s “front line” or just a “buffer state,” calling to mind Germany stripped of its army after Versailles. Either way, the only clear outcome is that Putin gets more time, Zelensky gets more uncertainty, and Trump gets another shot at a photo op.

But even international theater pales next to the rot at home. Speaker Mike Johnson has gone to ground, silent since late July, because the Epstein files are a cancer devouring the MAGA brand from within. Johnson and Oversight chair James Comer have been slow-walking subpoenas, delaying Ghislaine Maxwell’s deposition, and even resurrecting Bill Barr to recycle his “totally exonerated” routine. Victims’ lawyers are clear: this isn’t transparency, it’s re-victimization. Trump himself waved it all off as a “hoax,” even as his DOJ secretly granted Maxwell a cushy transfer to a minimum-security camp. He now mutters about wanting to “get to heaven”, proof that when all else fails, the MAGA communications playbook is to throw in some God talk and hope the flock forgets.

The victims haven’t forgotten. Democrats like Robert Garcia and Jasmine Crockett haven’t forgotten. And the silence of “MAGA Mike” tells us everything we need to know: if these files really cleared Trump, they’d already be stapled to his Truth Social page. Instead, they’re being redacted, delayed, and hidden, a cover-up so obvious it could serve as the textbook definition.

So here we are: women dead in Texas emergency rooms because doctors are afraid to act, physicians nationwide forced to fight pseudoscience instead of illness, jackboots in D.C., auctioneers running the IRS, Putin stringing Trump along, and the Epstein scandal eating the Speaker of the House alive. In Trump’s America, tragedy, chaos, and cover-up aren’t accidents. They’re the operating system.

And through it all, Marz the mastiff continues his slow recovery, still on guard duty, still announcing himself to delivery drivers as if the Republic depended on it. Which, frankly, it might. (I haven’t had the heart to tell him he doesn’t come across quite as dominant and imposing wearing an inflatable collar.)