Robots, Real Estate, and Repression: The Week Democracy Tripped Over a MAGA Mug

Ukraine builds the future while Trump builds walls around the truth and RFK Jr. diagnoses progress as a pandemic

Good Morning! We may as well start at the top, where the Trump administration has decided that Reuters, AP, and Bloomberg are too “mainstream” for the presidential press pool. That’s right, wire services that provide real-time, accurate information to literally billions of people have been kicked off Air Force One because they didn’t refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” like Trump demanded. In their place? A rotating cast of 30 flatterers who can parrot the president’s “message” without asking inconvenient questions like, “Is that even legal?”

Karoline Leavitt, America’s favorite ventriloquist dummy for tyranny, now handpicks which journalists get to breathe White House air. This is the same Leavitt who makes Goebbels look like he needed a better script editor. But make no mistake, this isn’t just about media access. This is about erasing truth in real time and replacing it with something MAGA-certified and poll-tested for maximum obedience. She's not a press secretary, but an obedience czar with eyelash extensions.

Speaking of czars, Steve Witkoff, the real estate mogul turned Special Envoy to Ukraine, is now the leading voice whispering sweet nothings about “engagement with Russia” directly into Trump’s ear. Never mind that Russia is actively murdering civilians in Ukraine. Never mind that Putin just rejected a 30-day ceasefire. Never mind that Ukrainian energy infrastructure is being bombed into the Stone Age. Witkoff, who’s now met Putin three times, is currently in France sipping espresso and swapping notes with Macron while Ukraine is left to fight a genocidal war with recycled parts and duct tape.

But even as the Trump administration shrugs off its NATO commitments and Pentagon officials question why Europe is still sending aid to Kyiv, Ukraine isn’t waiting around. Nope. They’ve unleashed the Brave-1 trials, where 70 unmanned ground vehicles, each homegrown, rugged, and magnificent, navigated a 10-kilometer gauntlet of jamming signals, e-warfare, and simulated hellscapes. These aren’t glossy prototypes; they’re battlefield companions already in use by Ukrainian assault brigades. Robots clearing mines, hauling gear, evacuating wounded, all while NATO debates whether it should even show up.

Trump chases “peace deals” that smell a lot like surrender, while Ukraine builds the future. And it’s badass. This is defiance on treads.

Meanwhile, Dan Caldwell, one of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top advisers, just got escorted out of the Pentagon like a man who lost a game of "who leaked the war plan." Caldwell, a key figure in Yemen coordination and Ukraine strategy, found himself on the wrong end of a polygraph dragnet. Apparently, when your Signal chat mistakenly includes a journalist, someone has to be punished. And in true Trump fashion, accountability isn’t for the people who created the disaster, it’s for whoever was easiest to walk out the door.

In Maryland, Senator Chris Van Hollen is doing what the executive branch won’t: showing up. Van Hollen announced during a town hall that he’s flying to El Salvador today to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the wrongfully deported Maryland father currently imprisoned in one of Bukele’s infamous mega-prisons. Despite a Supreme Court order and a federal district court ruling commanding his return, the Trump administration refuses to retrieve him. Bukele, for his part, is calling Abrego Garcia a “terrorist,” while Trump’s White House shrugs and claims their hands are tied. You can only defy so many branches of government before your tree rots and this administration smells like sawdust.

But perhaps the most chilling note of all comes from RFK Jr., who has decided that autism isn’t a condition, it’s a crisis. Speaking on Fox, Kennedy declared that the rise in autism rates “dwarfs COVID”, yes, the pandemic that killed 7 million people. He’s now launching a massive investigation into the “cause” of autism by September, which is about as scientifically sound as diagnosing migraines with a divining rod. The truth? Diagnoses are up because care is improving, access is expanding, and we’ve finally begun to recognize that not all children express development the same way.

But Kennedy doesn’t want better outcomes, he wants a scapegoat. And what’s more marketable than reviving the dead myth that vaccines cause autism? As one advocate put it, “You don’t die of autism. You live as an autistic person.” Kennedy’s framing doesn’t just betray science, it endangers lives. He’s not fighting for autistic people. He’s fighting against their existence being seen as valid.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the connective thread of the day. Because as one biologist friend once put it, “Autism is the next evolution of mankind.” In a world of brute-force ignorance and authoritarian decay, maybe neurodivergence, creativity, and nonconformity are the only things that will save us.

So here we are. The courts are being ignored. The press is being muzzled. Diplomacy is being outsourced to real estate agents. But Ukraine is still building, Van Hollen is still flying, and somewhere in a scrapyard near Kharkiv, a little robot just rolled over a jammed signal and kept going.

Maybe that’s the headline today: Scrappy wins wars. Even when the grown-ups leave the room.