Predator Patio, Mercenary Markets, and the Epstein Cover-Up

From bankrupt farms to mercenary profiteers, from censored boos to silenced victims, Trump’s America is rotting in plain sight.

Good morning! The week ends with Trump’s America looking like a Potemkin country, farms collapsing, allies raided, protesters in the streets, and a president insisting that the real problem is not his chaos but that people keep noticing it.

Start with the farm belt, once the fertile soil of Trump’s voter base, now wilting under his own policies. Soybean farmers who used to count on Chinese orders before harvest are staring at empty ledgers. Fertilizer prices have shot through the roof thanks to tariffs, and immigrant labor, the backbone of U.S. agriculture, is fleeing under the threat of ICE dragnets. Bankruptcy filings are up, debt is at record highs, and Trump’s solution is the same tired promise of bailouts. Subsidies can’t replace markets, but try telling that to a man who thinks tariffs are “free money.” The “forgotten men and women” of rural America are being reminded daily that loyalty to Trump doesn’t pay the bills.

South Korea has learned that lesson, too. Nearly 500 workers at Hyundai’s $8 billion EV battery plant in Georgia were rounded up in what Trump bragged was the largest ICE raid in U.S. history. More than 300 of them were South Korean nationals, detained like hostages until Seoul negotiated their release on a chartered flight. Hyundai and LG have now suspended business travel to the United States because apparently attending a meeting in Georgia might land you in a detention center. Nothing says “welcome investment” like sending your partners home in chains. It’s economic extortion, and the message to America’s allies is clear: do business here, and your workers may be pawns in Trump’s next shakedown.

The streets, however, are not silent. This weekend, tens of thousands marched in Washington, D.C. under the banner “We Are All DC: End the Occupation.” Churches rang their bells as the crowd pushed back against Trump’s military patrols. In Chicago, demonstrators rallied after Trump threatened to unleash his newly rebranded “Department of War” on the city, even posting a meme of himself as Colonel Kilgore: “Chipocalypse Now, I love the smell of deportations in the morning.” Cadet Bone Spurs, who ducked Vietnam five times, now cosplays as a warlord on social media while his administration tries to provoke clashes so they can send in the Marines. Governors Pritzker and Newsom condemned the threats, and Canadian MP Charlie Angus warned allies: if Trump brutalizes his own citizens, he won’t hesitate to turn the screws on everyone else.

Polite weekend marches make headlines, a few anyway, but until the disruption spills into weekday business as usual, when commerce and politics feel the squeeze, this regime, with its tame corporate media chorus, will keep pretending nothing’s wrong. Street theater on Saturday may inspire; strikes and blockades on Tuesday would terrify.

And while protesters march, Trump’s courtiers sip Diet Cokes at his tacky new “Rose Garden Club,” a cement patio where Jackie Kennedy’s roses once bloomed. MAGA elites post selfies from “Predator Patio” while the economy tanks, jobs vanish, and grocery bills soar. Trump himself, meanwhile, is so fragile he demanded broadcasters censor the boos that rained down on him at the U.S. Open. Networks were asked not to show crowd reactions if they turned hostile, a kind of pre-emptive North Korean edit suite for American television. Dictatorship 101: when the people jeer, order the cameras to look away. The irony is that in trying to hide the boos, he amplified them; nothing says “the emperor has no clothes” like needing a formal policy against showing the public’s disgust.

Meanwhile, the war profiteers are already carving up the next conflict. Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and patron saint of mercenaries, has been spotted in Kyiv pitching himself to Ukraine’s drone sector. Blackwater’s legacy is the 2007 massacre of 17 civilians in Baghdad, but in Trump’s America that’s just another line on the résumé. Prince wants to buy up Ukrainian drone firms, tapping into the technology that now accounts for 80 percent of Russian casualties. He tried the same thing in Afghanistan, offering to privatize the war through mining concessions. He’s already running drone assassination programs in Haiti. Now he’s circling Ukraine, sniffing out minerals and contracts like a vulture in tactical gear.

He’s not alone. Trump’s Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announced plans to “Unleash U.S. Military Drone Dominance” in July. Former CIA director David Petraeus is advising a new contractor. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt now proudly calls himself an arms dealer. All the old warhorses of the forever war economy are cashing in, and Prince, MAGA’s mercenary messiah, is right in the mix. Trump may not deliver peace, but he’s certainly delivering profits to his friends. The Pentagon gets its “Department of War” rebrand, and Prince gets to turn Ukraine into his next cash cow.

Inevitably, we come back to the Epstein files, the scandal Trump cannot bury no matter how many times he yells “hoax.” Nine attorneys representing fifty survivors told the Guardian they’ve had zero contact from the Trump DOJ. Not one call. Not one interview. Nothing. Instead, Deputy AG Todd Blanche spent two days interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell with questions so soft they could have been scripted by a PR firm, then moved her to a cushy low-security camp. FOIA requests for documents have been delayed until 2027, after the mid-term elections. This is a cover-up wearing a name tag.

At the same time, Trump’s DOJ begged a federal judge not to unseal the names of two Epstein associates who received $100,000 and $250,000 payments in late 2018, right when the Miami Herald was publishing its bombshell exposés. Prosecutors themselves flagged them as “potential co-conspirators.” In any functioning justice system, those names would be public by now. Instead, Trump’s DOJ cites “privacy interests” to keep them sealed. Victims’ interests, apparently, don’t count.

And the stories keep surfacing. An Australian model recalls Epstein dressing her as a “sexy nurse” to bring to Donald Trump’s apartment in the late ’80s. Epstein bragged about bailing Trump out of bankruptcy, lending him his plane, and showing off their friendship. Michael Wolff, Epstein’s would-be biographer, says Epstein showed him photos of Trump with topless girls of indeterminate age, laughing at a crotch stain. Trump’s defenders now spin fairy tales that he was really an FBI informant, the noble undercover hero who toppled Epstein. Trump himself insists the whole thing is a Democratic hoax, even as his name appears repeatedly in call logs, the black book, and the files his own DOJ refuses to release.

But here’s the problem for the GOP: the survivors are watching, waiting, and compiling their own record. If the state keeps stonewalling, the victims themselves will release a list, one built not on rumors or cover stories but on testimony, documents, and lived experience. When that day comes, it won’t just scorch Trump; it will stain the entire Republican Party that spent years shielding him from accountability.

So here’s your Sunday snapshot: farmers abandoned to bankruptcy, allies treated like hostages, protesters marching against military occupation, mercenaries circling Ukraine, sacred mountains bulldozed into tourist traps, and victims of sex trafficking silenced while their abusers are protected. Trump calls it greatness. The rest of us call it a circus of corruption, grift, and cruelty.