The Empire Crumbles During Commercial Breaks

Super Bowl culture wars, ICE abroad, Trump’s Board of Peace grift, and Tulsi Gabbard’s classified lockdown

Good morning! Because America is now incapable of holding even a sporting event without turning it into a referendum on authoritarianism, the Super Bowl is arriving this weekend as a national culture-war potluck where everyone brought something unhinged. The official halftime show belongs to Bad Bunny, a global superstar, Puerto Rican icon, and yes, an American, the first solo Spanish-language headliner to take that stage, which should be a celebratory moment in a normal country. Instead, conservatives responded exactly as you’d expect, by treating a pop performance like a foreign incursion. Turning Point USA has organized an “All-American” alternate halftime show, because nothing screams patriotic confidence like counterprogramming an American artist in Spanish with Kid Rock and a prayer circle.

And the funniest part is that even the musicians are backing away from the MAGA music-industrial complex. Kid Rock’s own “Rock the Country” festival is already hemorrhaging artists. Shinedown, Ludacris, Morgan Wade and others have exited, and now the South Carolina stop has been outright canceled, with Shinedown issuing the devastatingly polite statement that their purpose is to unite, not divide. Translation: We are not playing the soundtrack to your grievance rally.

The same political stink is drifting across the Atlantic. At the Winter Olympics in Milan, JD Vance popped up on the big screen during the opening ceremony and was greeted with scattered boos, a reminder that outside the Fox News terrarium, Trumpworld is not universally adored. Protesters marched through the streets chanting “ICE out,” furious over the revelation that ICE agents were reportedly deployed to Italy as part of the security circus. Nothing speaks international goodwill like bringing America’s deportation force to the Olympics.

And in perhaps the most coherent American messaging of the week, skier Gus Kenworthy responded by urinating “FUCK ICE” into the snow. Subtle? No. Appropriate for the moment? Abso-fucking-lutely.

The Milan story didn’t end there. On Saturday, thousands marched again, and what began as a broad demonstration over the cost and environmental wreckage of the Games escalated into clashes with riot police, water cannons, fireworks, and arrests, the familiar choreography of a state responding to dissent with armor. Vance, meanwhile, was reportedly booed again at a hockey match before receiving a private tour of The Last Supper in a museum closed to the public. Protesters get detained, the vice president gets Da Vinci. That’s the Trump-era export: spectacle, repression, and VIP impunity, now touring internationally.

Back home, Trump himself is skipping the Super Bowl, which Seth Meyers noted is strange for a man who treats public attention like a controlled substance. Trump claims Santa Clara is “too far away,” which is a truly incredible excuse from someone with a private jet who has flown across continents to shake down allies and golf in Scotland. The real reason is obvious: he’s terrified of getting booed on live television, the way Vance just was in Milan, the way Trump has been at NFL games before. Authoritarians love crowds, but only the kind that clap on command.

Even Trump, who has spent the last decade treating political norms like optional terms and conditions, occasionally collides with the last remaining guardrail: public outrage. This week, after posting a grotesquely racist clip depicting the Obamas as apes, the backlash was so loud that the White House actually did the unthinkable and deleted it, blamed an unnamed “staffer,” and offered the familiar non-apology condemnation without ever managing the words I’m sorry. The shock wasn’t the racism, sadly on-brand, but that even Republicans like Tim Scott couldn’t wave it off as “fake outrage” this time. With midterms looming, Trump is being reminded that political gravity still exists, at least until the news cycle moves on and he goes right back to doubling down. For now, we have him on his heels!

Looming over all of it, like a rot under the stadium lights, is Trump’s desperate insistence that everyone stop talking about the Epstein files. Stephen Colbert tracked Trump’s latest demand that the country “move on,” delivered while he snapped at Kaitlan Collins for not smiling enough, because nothing says innocence like misogynistic rage at a woman asking questions about survivors of sex trafficking. Jimmy Kimmel, watching the suspiciously inflated audience score for the Melania documentary, joked we may need Tulsi Gabbard to seize the ticket machines and audit the popcorn buckets.

The BOP is back, and it’s somehow even weirder now that it’s real enough to have calendar invites. Trump’s self-appointed “Board of Peace” is scheduled to meet in Washington on Feb. 19, with the stated goal of raising reconstruction funds for Gaza, but with a charter that quietly expands its scope into something much bigger and much more ominous.

Critics are already pointing out what it looks like: a parallel international system built outside the UN framework, where Trump sits as chairman with veto-like authority and membership comes with a literal price tag, $1 billion contributions for permanent members, like some sort of geopolitical cover charge.

The guest list tells you everything. Orbán is already confirming attendance, and the roster is stacked with authoritarian-friendly partners and transactional allies: Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, Qatar, Argentina, Pakistan. Meanwhile, major European allies like France are declining to join, signaling just how skeptical the traditional postwar alliance structure is about this whole thing.

And in today’s episode of Trump’s expanding parallel-universe foreign policy, the president welcomed Honduras’s newly sworn-in leader, Nasry Asfura, to Mar-a-Lago and declared the two countries were partnering to “counter dangerous cartels and drug traffickers” while deporting “illegal migrants and gang members” from the United States.

Which would be easier to take seriously if Trump hadn’t recently pardoned Asfura’s predecessor, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in U.S. court for effectively turning Honduras into a narco-trafficking pipeline. So the message is essentially: drug trafficking is an unforgivable threat to national security unless you’re politically useful, in which case you get clemency and a handshake at the resort.

And this is where it dovetails perfectly with Trump’s new “Board of Peace.” The Board is supposedly about “enduring peace,” but what it’s really building is a new ecosystem of transactional strongman diplomacy, where accountability is negotiable, allies are purchased, and corruption is just another form of leverage. It’s impunity diplomacy with a charter.

While Trump is busy founding his own international vanity project, the intelligence community is dealing with something far more immediate: a whistleblower allegation that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, may have intervened to suppress an NSA report involving a foreign intelligence-linked phone call with someone close to Trump.

According to the whistleblower’s attorney, the NSA flagged the call last spring, the kind of intercept that would normally trigger routine dissemination across the intelligence agencies and congressional oversight channels. Instead, Gabbard allegedly blocked the report from being distributed, took a paper copy directly to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and then instructed the NSA not to publish the intelligence report at all, keeping it sealed for months.

Eight months later, Congress is only now receiving a heavily redacted version, after the legal window for whistleblower transmission should have long since closed. Democrats are accusing the administration of trying to bury the complaint. Executive privilege is being invoked, which is essentially a flare signaling that this touches Trump directly. Lawmakers are now reportedly bypassing ODNI entirely and requesting the underlying intelligence straight from the NSA, because they no longer trust the political appointees sitting on top of the system.

This is real-time institutional capture: intelligence treated not as a national security responsibility, but as a loyalty-managed asset. The intercept doesn’t move through the proper channels; it moves through the Trump inner circle. The watchdog office gets staffed with partisan allies, the complaint gets locked down, and the public is left watching the architecture of oversight quietly rot from the inside.

Quick note of clarification: in yesterday’s roundup, I misstated a detail in describing Renée Good’s killing. I wrote she was standing beside her vehicle when she was shot. Most of you understood I meant her killer, Jonathan Ross was beside her car, but accuracy matters, so I’m correcting the record here. Not making excuses, but my grammar-checking app was not functioning and I was focused on commas, colons, semicolons and manually policing punctuation like it was 1850. Still, I should have caught my error.

So yes: welcome to Super Bowl weekend in 2026, where the halftime show has a shadow halftime show, ICE has a foreign deployment, Europe is booing the vice president, Trump is hiding from stadium crowds, and even Kid Rock can’t keep his lineup together. The empire is not only crumbling, it’s doing it during commercial breaks.

Marz and I are headed out for a rainy romp now that my flu-like symptoms have finally abated. We continue to send you love and gratitude during our moonbeam vigils each night. You know we’re thinking of you out there holding space with us, tired but unbowed against all of this chaos. And on a lighter note, Go Seahawks!