Reality Remains Stubbornly Noncompliant

While ordinary Americans navigate medical systems, rising costs, voter suppression, and actual emergencies, Trump continues waiting for the country to accept that everything is fine because he said so

Early this morning, before the day had fully stretched itself awake, we planted a sun hydrangea in the fairy garden bed, along with a Kaleidoscope, a Bloomerang lilac, a butterfly bush, and a mock orange. The entire bed is now lined with mystical rocks and its own little river, because apparently becoming first time homeowners has awakened our desire to construct an enchanted municipal park in the yard.

It’s coming together beautifully. There are flowers, winding stones, water, and enough whimsy to make me believe a small council of fairies will soon arrive with zoning complaints. We also have an extra kid and an extra dog today, which is both stressful and adorable, the preferred emotional combination of a house full of children and animals. There’s always somebody hungry, somebody barking, somebody asking a question they have already asked four times, and at least one mysterious sound that requires investigation.

Ezra is happy, and we finally have movement on his MRI. I received a call about scheduling, which doesn’t mean the medical facilities involved have suddenly learned how to communicate with one another, but it does mean the machinery has shifted slightly in the direction of progress. The process remains frustrating, fragmented, and apparently dependent upon me serving as an unpaid communications director for several institutions with telephones, computers, fax machines, and no detectable ability to use them together. Still, there is movement, and I will share a longer update when I know more.

My daughter’s chiffon skirts and leotards are supposed to arrive today, so she is patiently awaiting the USPS with all the patience of a hungry dog watching someone open a package of lunch meat. Every vehicle sound could be the mail truck, every moment without ballet clothes is an injustice, and somewhere, a postal worker is unknowingly carrying the most important shipment in the history of modern dance.

My oldest is getting there. Every day is a new day, or at least that’s what we aim for, and he is trying harder. I finally convinced him to stop leaving his scooters directly in front of the door, although conventional parenting techniques proved useless and I eventually had to threaten to remove one piece from the scooter every time I found it there. He has always responded best to comedy punishment, which gives him a special place in my heart and may eventually earn me a special place in a parenting study.

That’s where we are, navigating first time homeownership, special needs kids, impatient ballerinas, a thoroughly jacked medical system, a rotating population of children and dogs, and the ordinary emotional labor of being people in the United States of America. Donald Trump, however, has decided that he doesn’t have to navigate anything. He simply has to announce that everything is fine and wait for reality to become embarrassed enough to leave.

Trump is traveling to California and Nevada to talk about the economy, which seems brave considering the economy will also be there. An AP-NORC poll found that only 32 percent of Americans approve of his handling of it, while 69 percent describe economic conditions as poor. Inflation remains elevated, housing remains painfully expensive, interest rates remain high, and gasoline prices have been pushed upward by the war with Iran.

Trump intends to counter this by pointing toward the stock market and explaining that prosperity is everywhere if Americans would simply stop checking their bank accounts. Unfortunately for him, voters have encountered grocery stores, landlords, utility bills, and gas pumps, all of which continue producing unauthorized economic information.

The administration’s argument appears to be that the economy is strong because certain numbers look impressive when separated from the people living beneath them. It is the political equivalent of telling a family their roof isn’t leaking because the house has excellent resale potential. The water pouring into the kitchen is merely refusing to appreciate the broader fundamentals.

Trump may also want to avoid discussing banking too specifically, because Capital One revealed in a court filing that it closed roughly 300 accounts connected to the Trump Organization in 2021 after a months-long review by its anti-money laundering specialists.

This doesn’t prove that Trump or his companies committed money laundering, and Capital One hasn’t accused them of doing so. The bank says it identified transaction patterns among the kinds of activity flagged by federal banking guidance and decided to terminate the accounts for financial and regulatory reasons. Trump insists the closures were politically motivated and sued the bank for allegedly “debanking” him.

Capital One says the decision was confidential until Trump filed the lawsuit that caused the bank to explain it publicly, which means Trump may have accidentally conducted discovery on himself. There is something magnificent about suing a bank for refusing to tell everyone why it closed your accounts, only to have the bank respond in court that its anti-money laundering team spent months examining them. Trump wanted the world to know he had been treated unfairly, and the world has now been handed several hundred folders labeled “areas of concern.”

Meanwhile, Todd Blanche’s nomination to become attorney general advanced through the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 12 to 10 party line vote after he formally abandoned the proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund.”

The fund emerged from a settlement between Trump and his own administration and could’ve been used to compensate Trump allies who claimed they were unfairly targeted by the government. Republican holdouts objected, Blanche promised the fund was dead, and everyone resumed moving his nomination forward as though the country had narrowly escaped a freak clerical error rather than a plan to create a federal reimbursement program for the president’s political grievances.

The settlement’s retroactive protection shielding Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization from certain IRS audits remains in place. In other words, the enormous compensation fund was apparently a bridge too far, but special tax protections for the president’s family were still within walking distance.

Critics also warn that the fund could be revived after Blanche is confirmed unless Congress acts to prevent it. Blanche says it’s gone, Republican senators say they are satisfied, and Trump has already suggested otherwise, creating the reassuring legal standard of trusting whichever member of the administration spoke most recently.

In Tarrant County, Texas, Republican commissioners are considering reducing Election Day polling places from 316 during the 2022 midterms to 176 this November. Early voting locations would fall from 50 to 42, even though the county has more than 1.3 million registered voters and dozens of races on the ballot.

Officials have defended previous reductions by citing lower turnout and the cost of operating polling sites. Voting rights advocates argue that the closures will make voting harder, particularly for communities that already face transportation, scheduling, and accessibility barriers.

Tarrant County has grown more politically competitive and is now majority people of color, making the sudden discovery that democracy contains too many convenient locations especially interesting. Apparently, when participation becomes unpredictable, fiscal conservatism develops an urgent concern about the electricity bill at the community center.

The proposal would eliminate 140 Election Day locations and then ask voters to interpret the longer lines as evidence that fewer locations were needed. It’s a beautifully self-sustaining theory. First you make voting less convenient, then you point to anyone who can’t overcome the inconvenience as proof that they weren’t interested enough.

A federal judge has also ruled that New York can’t prohibit federal immigration agents from wearing masks or require them to display visible identification. The judge found that the restrictions likely violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause because states generally can’t regulate federal law enforcement officers.

The court did allow New York’s ban on local police entering formal cooperation agreements with ICE to remain in effect, so the ruling wasn’t a complete victory for the administration. Still, the practical result is that masked federal agents can continue detaining people without clearly identifying themselves while the public is expected to distinguish a lawful arrest from a kidnapping through posture, confidence, and perhaps the general ambiance of the unmarked vehicle. The constitutional question is there, but so is the danger of normalizing armed, unidentified government agents operating in public. A government confident in the legitimacy of its actions shouldn’t need anonymity as a uniform.

Finally, the wildfires devastating the Spokane area have forced approximately 67,000 people to evacuate and destroyed around 700 buildings. More than 1,000 firefighters have been deployed, and the fires have burned roughly 16 square miles.

A man has now been charged with first degree arson for allegedly starting the Old Trails Fire, the largest of the three major fires. He is accused, not convicted, and the investigation will have to establish what happened. The people who lost homes, farms, animals, and entire pieces of their lives should remain the center of the story.

There’s no clever political declaration capable of rebuilding 700 structures or returning families to the places they had to flee. Fire doesn’t care how convincingly a president says the country is thriving. Neither do grocery bills, bank investigators, voters waiting in line, or frightened people confronted by masked agents who refuse to identify themselves.

At our house, we are learning that progress is usually imperfect and inconvenient. The garden requires digging, the MRI requires phone calls, the ballet clothes require waiting. The scooter requires the credible threat of gradual disassembly. Every problem asks something of us, and none of them disappear because we announce that everything is fine.

That may be the defining difference between ordinary people and the government currently ruling them. We navigate what’s real because we have no other choice. Trump believes reality should navigate around him. So far, reality remains stubbornly noncompliant.

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