Make America Affordable Again (Terms and Conditions Apply)

As Trump sells pardons and burns his own movement, even the climate files for revenge.

Good morning! The weather’s cooling, the planet’s warming, and Donald Trump is melting down. So basically, business as usual, except this time, even his supporters are lighting the merch on fire.

Let’s begin with the ProPublica bombshell that made the weekend feel like an ethics crime scene. Jeremy Kohler reports that Trump has been using his presidential clemency powers like a coupon book for his own past, pardoning people who were prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced by his own first-term Justice Department. You heard that right. These weren’t “Biden witch-hunt” cases. They were his. From Democratic city councilmen to Republican state senators to campaign financiers and Trump-world insiders, the president is systematically erasing his own administration’s work as though it were a bad Yelp review.

And it’s not just the convictions that disappeared. More than a billion dollars in victim restitution vanished with them, money that was supposed to go back to retirees, tribal investors, and defrauded taxpayers. Whole communities were robbed twice: first by the crime, then by the pardon.

Clemency under Trump has become a boutique service for the politically connected: the Sittenfeld pardon arranged through Jones Day alumni now on the government payroll; Devon Archer, the convicted financier turned MAGA martyr whose testimony against Hunter Biden conveniently preceded his get-out-of-jail-free card; and Brian Kelsey, who tried to un-ring his own guilty plea after funneling money into a failed congressional race, only to be “redeemed” by a full pardon approved by the very counsel’s office that claimed to be recused.

Doug Berman at Ohio State summed it up neatly: Trump isn’t correcting injustice; he’s rejecting his own justice system. Call it a loyalty rewards program, commit a crime, earn points, redeem for freedom, and keep the loot.

And that would be enough rot for one morning, but this White House insists on serving its corruption à la carte. Enter Act II: The Great Affordability Panic.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump is in a frenzy to make America affordable again, an uphill climb given that he’s the one who made it unaffordable in the first place. Tariffs drove up the cost of beef, coffee, and just about anything edible, but now he’s decided to lower them and call it a win. Never mind that the average price of a pound of coffee has shot up to $9.14 thanks to his own 50% import tax. He’s fixing the problem the way an arsonist redeems himself by holding the hose.

The administration is floating $2,000 rebates, 50-year mortgages, oil drilling approvals, and something called “deals with pharmaceutical companies”, which, if history is any guide, will probably involve giving them more money to charge us less and failing at both. Trump’s social media feed is one long tantrum about how the word “affordable” is a “Democrat con job,” which is a bold stance from a man who literally trademarked “Make America Affordable Again.”

Even his base seems to be losing patience. Across social media, former MAGA loyalists are filming themselves burning their hats and shirts, a nationwide bonfire of disillusionment. They’re calling Trump a fraud, a liar, and, in the words of one ex-supporter from Kansas, “a piece of [bleep].” The break came after Trump attacked Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie for demanding the release of the Epstein files. The MAGA faithful, once happy to eat from his hand, are now biting it.

Candace Owens calls him a “chronic disappointment.” Tim Dillon says this is “the beginning of the lame-duck presidency.” And when that crowd starts calling you a fraud, you might want to pause and consider that the spell has finally broken. As one meme making the rounds put it, “I will never forgive Trump for making me agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene.”

That’s the energy now, the disoriented, post-cult whiplash of people realizing they’ve been conned by a man who’s somehow managed to make MTG look like the voice of reason. Trump, meanwhile, is golfing with Lindsey Graham at Mar-a-Lago, the ultimate swamp-buddy photo op, while Greene hires private security over death threats and posts that she now understands “what Epstein’s victims must have felt.” You couldn’t script a more deranged morality play if you tried, the patriarch of MAGA imploding under his own gravity while the faithful set fire to their hats and start googling “deprogramming.”

Actual lives hang in the balance in Newport, Oregon, where the community just revolted against plans for an ICE detention center at the municipal airport. The federal contractor quietly withdrew its letter of intent, but locals aren’t fooled. Job postings for detention officers, inquiries about septic capacity, and a very real helicopter evacuation, the Coast Guard rescue chopper that once launched from Newport now reassigned to the long-established station in North Bend, extending response times for fishermen in distress, make it painfully clear that the administration’s priorities are upside down. Newport loses the aircraft that hauls people out of rough seas, and in its place the federal government toys with installing a detention complex. North Bend, by the way, is a mere fifteen miles as the crow flies, from my front door.

“Detaining lives,” one resident said, “has become more important than saving lives.” And there it is, the perfect epitaph for Trump’s America. The Oregon DOJ reminded everyone that leasing local land for ICE would violate the state’s sanctuary law, which seems to have become the last functioning firewall between humanity and fascism. And while Newport begs for its rescue helicopter back, the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem is rolling out new “cost-effective” detention projects with frat-house nicknames like Alligator Alcatraz and Cornhusker Clink. America’s immigration policy, brought to you by a Florida car dealership.

All this is happening in the same economy that’s quietly repossessing homes faster than at any time since 2010. The foreclosure crisis we’ve been tracking is now officially the ugly twin of the affordability charade. Deregulated banks, weakened oversight, and Wall Street vultures are buying up foreclosed homes in bulk, securitizing them, and renting them back to the people they displaced, a perverse closed loop of profit. And who just happened to receive a Trump pardon this year? David H. Wilson, the banker convicted for the very kind of fraud that fueled the last housing collapse. His slate wiped clean, his friends richer than ever, and millions of families right back where they were fifteen years ago, locked out of the market and into the myth of trickle-down prosperity.

Trump insists we’re living in a “golden age.” If you can’t afford coffee, rent, or medication, maybe you can warm yourself with the glow of the polar vortex barreling our way.

Meteorologists are warning of something extraordinary in the stratosphere, a potential sudden stratospheric warming that could shove Arctic air straight into the lower 48. Judah Cohen at MIT says if it happens, it’ll be the first recorded in November in the satellite era, a hundred-degree swing at the top of the world that could flip winter on its head. In other words: nature’s about to stage a coup on the climate deniers.

It’s La Niña versus the polar vortex, and while scientists debate which one wins, the rest of us might just lose feeling in our toes. If the coupling holds, we’re in for a deep freeze through January. If not, it’s another weirdly warm winter, either way, a reminder that the real power in this world doesn’t sit behind a podium; it howls overhead.

So as Trump pardons the corrupt, gaslights the poor, and golfs through the collapse, the planet is quietly preparing to deliver its own verdict. A sudden warming at the pole, a sudden cooling at home, poetic symmetry for a presidency where everything that rises must eventually come crashing down.

Bundle up, America. The golden age is about to get frostbite.

Marz and I are going to work in a good romp before the weather gets any weirder.