The Exorcism and the Possession

King Charles purges a prince, Trump devours a republic, and America spends Halloween haunting itself.

Good morning! The ghosts are restless this Halloween. Over in Britain, King Charles finally performs an exorcism worthy of Shakespeare, banishing his disgraced brother from the royal registry and the Windsor estate. Prince Andrew is dead; long live Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, a man now stripped of titles, honors, and the family’s best address, all because of his long, sordid association with Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire pedophile who collected powerful friends the way other men collect indictments. The palace insists the move is about “sympathy for victims,” but the subtext is simpler: the royal family finally noticed the smell. The Duke of York has become the ghost in the palace walls, and Charles, wielding the royal prerogative like a can of Lysol, has ordered him out before the rot reaches the throne.

Across the Atlantic, the American monarchy is alive and well, its sovereign an adjudicated rapist who treats the Constitution as a punchline. Donald Trump, found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll, presides over the government shutdown from his gold-leaf crypt at Mar-a-Lago. He doesn’t banish monsters; he invites them to lunch. Trump’s own friendship with Epstein stretches back decades, flight logs, photo ops, and party footage that now read like a casting call for moral decay. The man who once bragged that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, many of them on the younger side” now runs the country on that same principle: power without accountability, appetite without end.

Arizona’s Attorney General has now sued the House, accusing Johnson of disenfranchising more than 800,000 Arizonans and “shielding the administration from accountability.” Trump’s associates call the Epstein scandal a “Democrat hoax,” and the Speaker says the delay has “nothing to do” with the documents.

It’s a deliciously brutish piece of political theatre: representation withheld, a district silenced, all because the power players don’t want their dirty laundry aired. And in this haunted house we call American democracy, the lights keep flickering while the speaker insists everything’s “just a procedural matter.”

The government is shuttered, nearly a million Arizonans have no representation, and the man responsible spends the weekend urging Republicans to “play their TRUMP CARD” and nuke the filibuster. Charles evicts his brother; Trump tries to evict the rule of law. One faces exile. The other demolishes the White House.

While the royal family scrubs its lineage clean, Washington’s zombies debate whether poor people should eat during the shutdown they created. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, remember when we called that “food”?, expires this weekend, threatening forty-two million Americans with hunger. Senator Josh Hawley, struck by a fleeting case of humanity, has filed a bill to keep the program running. Vice President J.D. Vance and Majority Leader John Thune, meanwhile, warn colleagues not to show weakness. Feeding children would “let the air out of the bubble,” they whisper, as though empathy were helium. Senator Lisa Murkowski points out that sixty percent of her state’s village stores survive on SNAP purchases; her colleagues nod gravely and return to strategy sessions on how best to starve their constituents without losing face. The party that once claimed to protect family values now treats hunger as a motivational tool. If Dickens had written The Handmaid’s Tale, it would look like the modern GOP.

As of this writing, the nation’s food assistance program hangs in the balance of a single judge’s patience and a $5 billion contingency fund that was never meant to feed forty-two million people for more than a few weeks. Yesterday, in a federal courtroom in Boston, Judge Indira Talwani all but laughed the administration’s lawyers out of the room when they argued that the U.S. Department of Agriculture couldn’t legally touch that emergency reserve during a shutdown. “Congress has told you what to do if there is no money,” she reminded them. “You need to figure out how to stretch that emergency money for now.”

Translation: stop playing chicken with hunger.

Her written ruling is expected any hour, and all signs suggest she’ll order the USDA to release at least part of the $5 billion to states to keep SNAP payments flowing, temporarily, imperfectly, and with the moral clarity of duct-taping a collapsing bridge. The contingency fund can cover perhaps a week or two of benefits, maybe less. It’s a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, but it beats letting the body bleed out while Congress argues over whose turn it is to reload.

In the meantime, governors are declaring emergencies like it’s the new form of prayer. New York has already pledged $65 million for food banks, a fraction of what will vanish if the federal spigot shuts off. Other states are raiding disaster funds, begging supermarkets to extend credit, and pretending they can ration compassion on a spreadsheet. Behind the scenes, the Office of Management and Budget is reportedly dragging its feet, less concerned with feeding families than with ensuring no one in Trump’s orbit looks like they blinked first.

So here we are: the safety net is now a ghost net, its threads visible only when someone falls through. A judge may yet throw it over the edge of the abyss long enough to catch a few million of us, but the larger question remains, why the richest nation on earth keeps treating hunger as a constitutional right for corporations and a seasonal affliction for everyone else.

And while the Senate toys with starvation, millions more face medical bankruptcy as Affordable Care Act open enrollment begins under the worst conditions in the law’s history. Premiums are spiking thirty percent or more just as enhanced subsidies expire, the same subsidies caught in the shutdown crossfire. A sixty-year-old couple making eighty-five grand could see their premiums jump from six hundred dollars to twenty-six hundred. Families will pay double for coverage they can’t afford to use, or they’ll drop it altogether. The Trump administration has even revoked coverage for Dreamers, because nothing screams fiscal responsibility like throwing cancer patients out of the clinic for speaking Spanish. The same people who call themselves pro-life are now pricing out the living. It’s not policy; it’s necromancy.

From his Palm Beach mausoleum, Trump keeps lobbing curses through Truth Social, demanding Republicans abolish the filibuster to reopen the government he broke. The Senate, already a mausoleum of civility, dutifully debates whether to cremate its own rules. Thune warns that ending the filibuster would “destroy the chamber.” News flash, John: the chamber is already destroyed. The ghost of democracy is rattling its chains, and the exorcist is on the ninth hole.

As if hunger and illness weren’t haunting enough, the Department of Justice has become a literal haunted house. Attorney General Pam Bondi, with acolytes Alina Habba and Desiree Grace, has completed Trump’s long-promised purge, gutting the ethics office, reassigning career prosecutors, and blessing political loyalty as the highest virtue. Investigations into Epstein, immigration abuses, and election interference have been quietly buried. The rule of law now exists primarily as a slogan on campaign merch. Where King Charles expelled his family’s shame to protect the crown, Trump expels the truth to protect himself. The DOJ’s marble halls echo like an abandoned cathedral where the hymns are NDAs and the incense smells faintly of bleach.

At the United Nations General Assembly, Florida congressman and U.S. representative Mike Waltz delivered a combative speech defending the Trump administration’s policy toward Cuba, sparking a rare procedural rebuke from the Cuban delegation. Waltz accused Havana’s government of being a “brutal and illegitimate regime” responsible for “human rights abuses, forced labor, and economic misery,” and dismissed the long-standing UN resolution condemning the U.S. embargo as “political theater.” He argued that the embargo was a myth, claiming the United States “has always allowed Cuba to import food, medicine, and humanitarian goods,” and cited half a billion dollars in U.S. exports to Cuba in 2024 as proof. Waltz also asserted that the Cuban government supports terrorism, aids drug cartels, props up Venezuela’s regime, and undermines democracy across the Western Hemisphere.

Cuba’s ambassador swiftly invoked a point of order, interrupting Waltz mid-speech to accuse him of lying, violating UN rules, and speaking “in an uncivilized, crude, and gross way” that disrespected both the Assembly and its member states. “This is the United Nations General Assembly,” the Cuban representative admonished. “It is not a signal chat, nor is it the House of Representatives.” When allowed to continue, Waltz fired back that the UN was “not a communist illegitimate legislature in Havana,” doubling down on his criticism of the Cuban regime. The exchange, equal parts diplomatic confrontation and partisan theater, underscored how sharply U.S. diplomacy under the Trump administration has diverged from traditional decorum, turning a routine annual vote on the embargo into a viral moment of international tension.

So here we stand on Halloween 2025: the King cleanses his house; the President burns ours down. Britain exorcises one ghost; America elects another. SNAP recipients rummage for groceries that won’t come, ACA enrollees choose between chemo and rent, and the Department of Justice performs a reverse exorcism, inviting the demons back in. The chandeliers of democracy still glitter, but only because the candles are melting faster than the wax can drip.

The tour guides will tell you everything’s fine, but the ghosts aren’t in the attic anymore. They’re at the Resolute Desk, signing executive orders with invisible ink.

Happy Halloween from the Haunted States of America, where accountability wears a crown, impunity wears a red tie, and democracy still insists on dressing as itself for the costume party.