The Great Unraveling: Illusions Collapsing in Real Time

From deported toddlers to luxury scams, from dying ports to panicking billionaires, the empire of lies is cracking under its own weight.

Good morning! It was only a matter of time. You can patch a leaking ship for a while, and you can slap new paint over rotten wood, but eventually the whole sorry mess starts collapsing in full view. Today's roundup brings the delicious spectacle of the Great Unraveling: a parade of lies, illusions, and scams, some decades in the making, finally cracking under the weight of their absurdity.

The day begins, fittingly, with the Trump administration perfecting its latest cruelty: deporting three U.S. citizen children, ages two, four, and seven, to Honduras without their medication, without their doctors, without even a courtesy nod to constitutional rights. One of the deported children is battling Stage 4 cancer, but in Trump's America, toddlers are acceptable collateral damage in the quest for mass removals and ethnic cleansing. ICE agents, who once promised a "more humane" approach, now conduct roundups at supervised check-ins, spiriting families away before lawyers or family members can intervene. We can all sleep easier now, knowing the real threat, cancer-stricken toddlers, has been neutralized.

Meanwhile, down in Florida, Ron DeSantis is redefining "freedom" yet again, this time by rolling back child labor protections. As DeSantis frantically deports immigrant farm workers, the same ones who keep Florida's agricultural economy alive, he has the brilliant solution of filling the gap with kids. Nothing screams “economic vitality” like putting twelve-year-olds in the fields so billionaires can keep their strawberries cheap. Freedom, it seems, is now the freedom to exploit your neighbor’s children for profit.

Speaking of men without shame, Donald Trump once again demonstrated his world-class cluelessness at Pope Francis’ funeral, striding into St. Peter’s Basilica in a blue suit and bright blue tie, surrounded by leaders dressed appropriately in somber black. When Ukrainian President Zelenskyy was announced, the crowd erupted in applause. When Trump’s name was read? Silence so thick it could have been cut with one of those novelty scissors they hand out at ribbon-cuttings. It was the perfect image of a has-been still clinging to the delusion that anyone outside his rally tents sees him as anything but a pariah.

And while Trump fumbled for relevance in Rome, back home his economic "genius" was busy torching the U.S. supply chain. His new tariffs, a 145% tax on Chinese goods, have triggered a 60% collapse in container bookings from China. American ports, especially Los Angeles and Long Beach, are bleeding business. Experts predict mass shortages by summer, skyrocketing freight costs, and mass layoffs in trucking and rail sectors. Trump's solution to global competition is apparently to starve the American consumer while declaring victory on Truth Social. MAGA: Making America Grovel Again.

Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has been busy turning Memphis, Tennessee, into the next Brownsville-style sacrifice zone. His XAI "Colossus" facility, running on 35 gas turbines and pumping tons of toxins into the air, is poisoning historically Black neighborhoods under the familiar banner of "technological innovation." Residents, led by State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, are fighting back, refusing to let Musk's empire of exploitation buy their silence. Musk may fancy himself a god of progress, but in Memphis, he’s just another polluter dressed like dark MAGA.

Musk’s troubles don’t end there. Apparently, the man who spent years hyping AI as humanity's great savior is now panicking that OpenAI’s GPT-4o might be a "psychological weapon." After helping normalize emotional manipulation through tech, Musk now clutches his pearls because someone else built a better mind-bender than him. It’s the classic Musk formula: create the fire, then shriek about the smoke when it stops blowing in his favor.

Meanwhile, far away from the AI panic rooms, a quieter, but equally satisfying collapse unfolded. Sarah Palin, the original matriarch of MAGA grift, saw her longshot defamation suit against The New York Times collapse for a second time. After years of courtroom drama, federal juries concluded yet again that Palin couldn't prove "actual malice" or much of anything else. Palin, who once claimed she could see Russia from her backyard, now apparently can’t even find a sympathetic jury willing to rewrite the rules of press freedom for her.

If that weren’t enough illusion-shattering for one day, enter Hermès. The luxury titan has been outed spectacularly: it turns out their $20,000 handbags, supposedly crafted by French artisans in candlelit workshops, are actually made almost entirely in Chinese factories. The French "touch"? A single button or stamp slapped on in France, allowing them to legally, and laughably, call it "Made in France." But much like Pete Hegseth furiously demanding lie detector tests after his own staff leaked about him leaking, Hermès isn’t mad about the scam itself, they’re mad that they got caught. Now they're suing the factories that dared to tell the truth, lashing out at the very people who built their empire of illusion. The scam is exposed, the resale prices are tanking, and the emperor's new Birkin is made in Shandong.

And finally, we return to Trump, whose once-fervent love affair with Vladimir Putin is facing some very inconvenient realities. Following a brutal missile strike on Kyiv, even Trump’s advisors, Fox News hosts, and Republican legislators are nervously asking why their fearless leader is cozying up to a murderer. Trump's approval ratings are plummeting faster than a New York ferry in a Nor’easter, and his latest social media post, suggesting Putin might be "stringing him along", reads less like strength and more like a man realizing too late that he’s the punchline of his own bad joke.

In the end, the illusions should be collapsing not because of moral awakenings or grand reckonings, but because the scams simply stopped working. The cons, the cover stories, the branding, the mythologies: all unraveling under the one force none of them can escape, reality. No lawsuits, no tariffs, no AI panic, no red tie will save them now.

The cracks are widening. And, oh, how sweet it is to watch the light pour through.