"Nobody’s Been Treated Worse Than Me"

Trump’s greatest-hits tour continues, now with canonizations, tariffs, and off-shore executions.

Good morning! It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump’s theology of grievance met the cold letter of the Constitution. Two leading conservative scholars, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, card-carrying members of the Federalist Society and lifelong originalists, have published a 126-page law-review treatise arguing that Trump is constitutionally disqualified from holding office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The article, “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” lays out what they call an “inescapable conclusion”: that Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his incitement of January 6 amount to “insurrection or rebellion.”

For once, Trump’s favorite legal scholars have turned their powdered-wig logic against him. The authors insist Section 3 is self-executing, no new statute, no congressional vote required, meaning Trump’s eligibility to serve again isn’t a political question, it’s a matter of constitutional hygiene. Or, as Baude and Paulsen put it, “The case for disqualification is strong, and the evidence is abundant.” Their conclusion landed like a heretical gospel in the Church of Trump, where loyalty is salvation and law is an inconvenience.

Trump, naturally, spent the day proving their point. He topped off Tuesday with all the pomp of a high Mass in his own honor, presiding over a Rose Garden canonization for Charlie Kirk, the slain far-right activist now awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The event had everything: scripture-adjacent rhetoric, a grieving widow, and Trump proclaiming Kirk a “martyr for truth and freedom.” The crowd clapped reverently, as though liberty itself had just been resurrected between ad breaks on Fox & Friends. What was once America’s highest civilian honor has now become the Medal of Fidelity, an amulet for loyalists who die in the service of delusion.

Within hours, Trump’s State Department added teeth to the new theology, revoking visas for foreigners who insulted the dead prophet. At least six people lost entry rights after posting about Kirk online, one said he “spread racist, xenophobic rhetoric,” another quipped that “when fascists die, Democrats don’t complain.” Marco Rubio’s office declared, “The U.S. has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans.” Translation: you’re free to speak, unless you offend the cult. America, land of the free, and home of the hypersensitive.

By evening, the gospel of grievance turned inward. Having canonized Charlie Kirk, Trump spent the rest of the day lamenting his own crucifixion at the hands of Time magazine’s photo editor. The magazine’s glowing profile of his Gaza “peace” deal came with a cover shot taken from below, sunlight blazing behind his head. Trump called it “super bad” and “the Worst of All Time,” raging that editors had “disappeared my hair” and given him “a floating crown, but an extremely small one.” Somewhere between the halo and the wattles, the would-be messiah of American decline learned that even divine light can be unforgiving.

The irony, of course, is that Time had quite literally depicted him as a holy figure: chin uplifted, backlit, radiant. But in Trump’s world, no blessing survives the wrong camera angle. Even Moscow weighed in, Russia’s foreign ministry accused Time of “perversion and malice,” defending the president’s sacred jawline with the zeal of a papal nuncio. In one of the darker moments of the day, it fell to Gavin Newsom to pixelate Trump’s neck in solidarity with the public’s eyes. By nightfall, the image had achieved its own kind of immortality: the haloed martyr of self-regard, undone by his own lighting.

Trump’s foreign policy team has been busy conducting extrajudicial executions in international waters. The president boasted that U.S. forces “took out six narcoterrorists” off Venezuela’s coast, the fifth such strike since September, bringing the total kill count to twenty-seven. No names, no proof, just flames on the horizon and a Commander-in-Chief declaring he has “standing authority” to kill anyone who might make cocaine. Congress, technically the branch that declares war, tried to intervene, but Senate Republicans blocked the measure. Trump’s logic remains pure MAGA algebra: Fentanyl kills Americans -Trump kills boats - problem solved.

On the home front, Americans are fighting a different kind of battle, the one at the grocery store. Prices for everything edible continue to climb. Ground beef’s up 13 percent, coffee up nearly 40 percent, and a rib-eye in Manhattan now costs about the same as a month of Wi-Fi. Tariffs on Brazil and Vietnam have torched the global coffee market, forcing Congress to propose a bipartisan No Coffee Tax Act because apparently this is where the republic draws the line. Coffee, The Atlantic reminds us, “has no nutritional value and plenty of substitutes,” yet somehow it’s the only thing keeping the national nervous system online. A White House that brags about “economic sovereignty” has discovered what every barista already knows: when you tariff your caffeine supply, you pick a fight with God. Amen to that!

But the real window into MAGA’s soul arrived courtesy of POLITICO’s leak of 2,900 pages of Young Republican group chats, in which the party’s up-and-comers spent months swapping racial slurs, Holocaust jokes, and sexual violence fantasies. One future GOP chair wrote, “I love Hitler.” Another mused that rape was “epic.” They even joked about fixing the “aesthetic” of gas chambers. These aren’t basement trolls, they’re congressional staffers and sitting legislators. When caught, they invoked the sacred right of all modern conservatives: the context defense. They claim they were joking, “taken out of context,” or victims of “a conspiracy.” The only thing taken out of context was human decency.

The economy of make-believe keeps inflating its own bubble. The tech sector, still worshiping at the altar of artificial intelligence, has perfected the art of round-tripping, OpenAI pays AMD $100 billion for GPUs, AMD “invests” $100 billion back, Nvidia adds phantom billions, and Oracle closes the circle like a digital money-laundering seance. It’s metaphysics. The only thing more artificial than the intelligence is the valuation. Silicon Valley’s new motto might as well be: Fake it till you float the entire global economy on vaporware. If I can stay caffeinated long enough, I hope to do a much deeper dive into this upcoming economic crash.

And just when you thought governance couldn’t get more absurd, the Arizona Attorney General threatened to sue House Speaker Mike Johnson for refusing to seat newly elected Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, who won her Tucson special election three weeks ago by nearly 70 percent. Johnson’s excuses, the shutdown, paperwork, planetary alignment, have worn thin. AG Kris Mayes called them “absurd” and “unconstitutional,” warning she’ll drag the Speaker into court if he doesn’t swear her in. Democrats and pretty much any normal observer, say the delay isn’t about procedure at all: it’s about blocking a vote to release the Epstein FBI files, which Grijalva’s seat would force by giving them the 218th signature on the discharge petition. Johnson insists it’s all coincidence, then blamed Biden for not releasing the files himself, a neat trick of circular deflection worthy of MC Escher.

The government that canonizes a conspiracy theorist for “freedom” is simultaneously denying 800,000 Arizonans their representative, protecting Epstein’s secrets, and declaring open-water warfare on alleged drug traffickers. All while your morning coffee costs more than your phone bill and the tech sector sells reincarnated tulip bulbs as “AI solutions.”

By sundown, America looked like a country run by people who think irony is policy: a state religion built on martyrdom, an economy powered by illusion, and a ruling party whose youth wing communicates exclusively in hate crimes and emojis. Welcome to the Martyr State, now serving freedom at market price.