The Rebellion That Wasn’t

Trump yells at allies, bulldozes the White House, and wins the right to invent insurrections, all before lunch.

Good morning! Donald Trump has spent the past week proving that when he promised to “rebuild America,” he meant it literally, starting by tearing it down first. He’s far better at demolition than construction, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the wreckage he’s gaslighting as progress. The East Wing is being bulldozed to make room for his “Golden Ballroom,” the Justice Department now functions as an arm of his personal grievance fund, and on the world stage he’s redefined diplomacy as performance art with yelling.

In the span of days, he’s managed to alienate allies, humiliate envoys, weaponize prosecutors, and declare peace in Gaza while the bombs are still falling. The man who once bragged about “building the greatest economy ever” now seems determined to prove that anything, a government, a constitution, a ceasefire, can be reduced to rubble if you bumble hard enough.

Trump’s latest meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to symbolize American leadership in a fragile moment. According to reports from Financial Times and European broadcasters, Trump screamed at the Ukrainian president to “stop at the battle lines” and cede the Donbas to Russia. Zelensky, who has buried half his cabinet’s worth of soldiers defending that land, shouted back.

For a few brief moments, the West Wing resembled a geopolitical cage match: one man trying to save his country, the other trying to remember which one it was. Trump reportedly warned that Putin would “destroy Ukraine” if Zelensky refused his “peace plan,” which was essentially a demand for surrender.

What Trump either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to understand is that Ukraine’s own constitution makes territorial surrender impossible. Article 17 explicitly forbids ceding any portion of the state’s territory by force or treaty. Even if Zelensky were inclined to humor Trump’s fantasy deal, which he most certainly isn’t, he legally cannot sign away the Donbas without violating the document he swore to uphold. To do so would dissolve the very sovereignty Trump claims to be negotiating over.

Yet Trump pressed anyway, badgering Zelensky to break his own laws on live television while parroting the Kremlin’s exact language about “the current line of contact.” It was an extraordinary moment of diplomatic malpractice, the President of the United States channeling Moscow more faithfully than Moscow’s own press office.

And that’s what reignited the oldest question of the Trump era: why does he always bend the knee to Vladimir Putin? Is it psychological, the strongman daddy complex that makes him swoon for authoritarians? Or something stickier, as the world has joked for years, the lingering scent of kompromat, the fabled “pee-tape” made metaphor? Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: the leader of the free world melting into a puddle every time the Kremlin whispers his name.

By the next day, Trump had traded fury for farce. His bilateral with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was meant to be about trade, energy cooperation, and critical minerals, the stuff of grown-up diplomacy. Australia came prepared to discuss lithium, rare-earth extraction, and ways to stabilize tariffs on steel and aluminum. Trump came prepared to talk about himself.

He kicked off the session by pointing to the assembled reporters and blurting, “Whoa, that’s a big crowd! That must mean you’re a very important country!”, as if size alone determined global significance. From there, he drifted into an incoherent sermon about tariffs, cousins, and “settling eight wars in eight months.”

“I’ve settled more wars than anyone,” he boasted. “Eight wars in eight months. Nobody else has ever done that. Tariffs did it, tariffs are peace!”

The Australian journalists in the room wore the glazed expressions of people watching a slow-motion car crash through a smile. Albanese nodded politely, the diplomatic equivalent of we’ll edit that out later, as Trump kept going.

Asked whether his trade tariffs were straining the U.S.–Australia relationship, Trump pivoted to Ukraine instead:

“Well, the tariffs have been amazing because they’ve helped us settle wars. You know, I settled eight wars in eight months. Not bad. And, by the way, Russia’s situation doesn’t affect us in any way. NATO’s paying us now for the weapons, they pay, we get paid. It’s a good deal.”

If Zelensky got the rage, Albanese got the rambling, two sides of the same delusion. One day Trump was shouting at an ally to surrender land to Russia; the next he was assuring another ally that global conflict was “good for business.”

The meeting that was supposed to strengthen trade ties and secure access to Australia’s rare-earth minerals instead turned into a one-man infomercial about tariffs, imaginary wars, and the metaphysics of being Donald J. Trump. Albanese, to his credit, responded with the calm of a man who’s realized he’s not talking to the United States so much as its live-action parody.

Trump’s behavior has so exasperated European allies that they’ve begun issuing joint statements that sound like hostages trying to flatter their captor. On Monday, Zelensky joined European leaders in releasing a communique that simultaneously praised Trump’s “wise” call for halting the fighting and reaffirmed that “international borders must not be changed by force.” The contradiction was a necessary survival tactic.

After Trump’s two-hour phone call with Putin reportedly “changed his view of the war,” the Europeans are now engaged in the most delicate form of crisis management imaginable: praising the arsonist while trying to save the building. They know they can’t alienate him outright, but they also can’t let him hand eastern Ukraine to Russia.

Across the continent, defense ministers are quietly accelerating their own rearmament plans, finally taking the hint that the U.S. might not be reliable much longer. As one diplomat put it off-record, “We’re all learning to live without the babysitter.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s much-vaunted “Gaza Peace Deal”, the one he called “historic” and “ironclad”, is already collapsing under the weight of reality. Vice President J.D. Vance flew to Israel this week with Trump’s favorite real-estate alchemists, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, to salvage a ceasefire that lasted twelve days before erupting into carnage.

On Sunday, Hamas killed two Israeli soldiers. Israel retaliated with airstrikes that killed dozens of Palestinians. Netanyahu called it “a blatant breach of the ceasefire” and bragged that Israel dropped 153 tons of bombs “with one hand holding a weapon, the other stretched out for peace.” Nothing says peace like 153 tons of ordnance.

Trump, for his part, told reporters, “We made a deal with Hamas that they’re going to be very good. They’re going to behave. They’re going to be nice.” If foreign policy were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the villagers run.

The UN’s World Food Programme reports that only two crossings into Gaza are open and that northern Gaza remains “extremely dire.” Half a million people are eating rationed meals while Trump congratulates himself for “ending the war.” His envoys are now trying to begin “Phase Two” of his 20-point plan: an interim Palestinian government that doesn’t exist and an international stabilization force that no one has volunteered to lead. Even Jared Kushner looks exhausted.

Back home, the government shutdown has stumbled into its fourth week, and the polls have finally broken through Trump’s gold-leaf bubble. Americans overwhelmingly blame him and congressional Republicans for the mess. Suddenly, the same lawmakers who swaggered into the shutdown are now floating the idea of extending the stopgap into next year, 2026, anything to crawl out from under the wreckage. What began as a seven-week funding punt has become an exercise in political triage: the GOP can’t reopen the government without angering Trump, and it can’t keep it closed without losing the country.

John Thune, playing his new role as Senate Majority Therapist, mused about “something much longer term.” Translation: “Make it stop.” Democrats aren’t playing along without ironclad promises to preserve Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire in December. Trump, who once mocked continuing resolutions as “Washington excuses,” is now surviving on them.

While the Senate tries to remember how government works, the Department of Justice is busy working as Trump’s personal law firm. Former FBI Director James Comey, the man who once called himself “the inconvenient witness” to Trump’s obstruction, is now the defendant in a politically engineered prosecution that even John Durham thought was nonsense.

Trump’s hand-picked U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, filed charges against Comey days after the president demanded them online. Career DOJ lawyers had already said there was no case. Halligan’s appointment itself may be illegal, but in the age of Trump, that’s practically a credential.

Comey’s motion to dismiss accuses the administration of “genuine animus” and “faulty indictment.” Translation: payback in a robe.

If that weren’t enough institutional decay for one week, the judiciary has now joined the bonfire. Harry Litman warns that a recent Ninth Circuit ruling on Trump’s use of the “rebellion” clause could hand him near-dictatorial power to deploy troops on U.S. soil.

On Monday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit, two of them Trump appointees, overturned a district court’s finding that there was no rebellion in Portland, only small, peaceful protests. Their 2-1 ruling lifted a block on Trump’s plan to federalize Oregon’s National Guard and send troops into the city, whose most dangerous feature lately has been people in inflatable frog costumes protesting outside an ICE office.

Judge Susan Graber’s dissent reads like the last telegram from a functioning democracy: “I urge my colleagues to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur.” In another line, she called the ruling “not merely absurd” but “erosive of core constitutional principles.” Translation: the court just gave Trump the right to treat cosplay as insurrection.

The majority accepted Trump’s claim that Portland constituted a “rebellion” under 10 U.S.C. § 12406, the statute allowing the president to federalize state militias when “unable with regular forces to execute the laws.” In reality, as Oregon’s governor Tina Kotek said, “there is no insurrection or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention.”

Kotek and Attorney General Dan Rayfield have asked the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case, warning that if it stands, Trump will have “unilateral power to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification.” The court’s 29 active judges, 16 Democratic appointees and 13 Republican, will vote this week on whether to revisit the ruling.

If they don’t, the implications are chilling. Trump could declare “rebellions” anywhere, anytime, a ready-made pretext to flood cities with troops under the guise of “law and order.” And as Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck notes, the logic wouldn’t stop at Portland. It could just as easily apply to Atlanta, Detroit, or any polling place Trump deems insufficiently adoring come Election Day. The rebellion may be fictional, but the power it grants is not.

As if to punctuate the week’s chaos, news broke late Monday that a pardoned Capitol rioter has been charged with threatening to assassinate House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a public event in New York. Christopher Moynihan, one of more than 1,500 January 6th defendants pardoned en masse by Trump earlier this year, was arrested after texting that he “could not allow this terrorist to live.”

Court filings show Moynihan boasted of plans to “eliminate” Jeffries, calling his potential act a duty to “the future.” He faces felony charges for making a terroristic threat and is being held in Dutchess County on bail.

Moynihan’s name is already familiar to prosecutors: he was among the first rioters to breach the Senate floor on January 6th, rifling through a senator’s notebook and shouting, “There’s gotta be something in here we can f***ing use against these scumbags.” Trump pardoned him nine months ago, a gesture he described as “restoring justice for patriots.”

This is exactly what critics of Trump’s blanket clemency predicted: a wave of recidivism from the unrepentant. Senator Dick Durbin warned of it months ago, listing multiple cases of pardoned rioters arrested again for violent acts. But this is the first time one has allegedly targeted a congressional leader, and it confirms what the rest of the world has already concluded: Trump doesn’t just reward lawlessness, he institutionalizes it.

The same president who calls January 6th defendants “hostages” has turned his mercy into a recruitment drive. The same man who preaches “peace” abroad is cultivating domestic insurgents at home.

So here we are: Comey fighting for the rule of law, Zelensky shouting for his nation’s survival, Europe rolling its eyes in unison, Gaza rationing food under a collapsing “peace,” and Trump promising that America is in a “golden age” as bulldozers chew through the East Wing.

Everything is under construction: the White House, the courts, the press, the country’s credibility, even our collective faith that any of this still works.

As for me, I’ll be limping through the news cycle on antibiotics and painkillers until November 17, when a particularly vengeful, and cracked molar finally gets evicted. Marz is unimpressed, he thinks a little dental agony builds character, and is already pawing at the door for a trail run.

So if today’s roundup feels slightly more delirious than usual, blame the swelling, not the satire. The world may fell apart at the seams, but at least one of us will be outside sniffing pine needles and pretending everything’s fine.