The Surcharge Empire Strikes Back

Treasury spin, DHS deepfakes, and the monarchy of make-believe, funded, of course, by your “patriotic investments.”

Good morning! America, democracy threw itself a street party. Seven million people poured into plazas, bridges, and boulevards under a single banner: No Kings. Times Square looked like Mardi Gras for the Constitution, Grant Park pulsed like a freedom festival, and Pennsylvania Avenue turned into a constitutional parade route. Even here, in my usually quiet corner of the map where protests rarely fill a high school gymnasium, the crowd topped a thousand strong, our largest turnout ever. Teachers, veterans, retirees, teenagers, a few dogs in yellow bandannas; it was the kind of multigenerational chaos the Founders would’ve toasted with hard cider. The mood was jubilant, defiant, contagious. Not a single counter-protester in sight, even the local MAGA chapter decided the monarchy could fend for itself.

The national numbers were staggering: the largest single day of protest in U.S. history, and yet police from New York to San Diego reported zero arrests. San Diego PD even thanked demonstrators for “keeping it classy,” a phrase that, in Trump’s America, qualifies as political poetry. The country remembered how to disagree beautifully, an act of rebellion in itself.

And how did the wannabe king react to his subjects celebrating independence? By posting AI videos of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet that drops excrement on protesters. You read that right: a sitting U.S. president sh*tposting from the throne, apparently convinced that defecating on his own citizens is a form of leadership. The global press barely knew how to translate it. South Korean commentators called him “a middle-school mind with executive power.” One headline asked bluntly: “Could this guy be a demon?”, which, given the genre crossover between K-dramas and American politics, feels fair.

Pro-fascist Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson is still refusing to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, the Democrat whose vote would force the release of the Epstein files. His excuse: “tradition.” The same “tradition” he ignored when he quietly swore in two Republicans during recess. Even CNBC hosts looked ready to throw a hymnal at him.

And yet, while Johnson hides behind parliamentary drapery, the streets outside his kingdom are anything but quiet. In Washington alone, more than 200,000 protesters chanted “Seat Her Now!” outside the Capitol, waving signs that read “No Kings, No Secrets” and “Swear Her In or We’ll Swear You Out.” The chants rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue like a drumline for democracy, and by evening it had become the rally’s unofficial refrain. The crowd wasn’t menacing; it was joyous, relentless, and utterly unimpressed by Johnson’s procedural cosplay. The message was simple: the people have already voted, and his stall tactics only make the monarchy look more desperate.

Thomas Massie, Kentucky’s accidental hero, called the bluff and reminded everyone that “the truth is coming out.” Trump responded with a midnight tantrum and a fresh endorsement of a challenger no one’s heard of. It’s panic in real time, the monarch screaming at his mirrors while the peasants outside throw confetti instead of stones.

Imagine if even a fraction of those 200,000 D.C. protesters decided to stay, not to blockade, but to bear witness. To line the streets every day until the Speaker acknowledged the mandate of the voters and seated Adelita Grijalva. Peaceful endurance, not confrontation, is what topples regimes that mistake silence for consent.

While that circus played out, the Republican–corporate alliance found a new frontier in hypocrisy. The Guardian uncovered that Big Soda, Coke, Pepsi, and Dr Pepper, has been quietly funding a campaign to pit MAGA against RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. The goal: convince Trump voters that banning Red 40 dye in school lunches is communist tyranny. They literally paid influencers to defend the Diet Coke button as a symbol of freedom. “Let them drink cola,” said the new Marie Antoinettes of Madison Avenue.

Presiding over this carbonated carnival of deceit is none other than Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who now claims with a straight face that “tariffs aren’t taxes, they’re surcharges.” Some economic snake oil wrapped in semantic tinsel. When your Treasury chief starts doing interpretive dance with the dictionary, you know the numbers have stopped adding up. Bessent’s spin turns tariffs into “fees,” deficits into “investments,” and recession into “realignment.” It’s linguistic laundering for the same old con: selling economic pain as patriotic sacrifice. Under Trumpism, even math has to swear loyalty to the crown.

While Bessent was out redefining taxes as tithes to the crown, the Trump regime’s Department of Homeland Security decided to test-drive its own brand of creative writing, in video form. Late Friday, DHS was caught red-handed fabricating a propaganda clip to claim that Mexican cartels had put $50,000 bounties on ICE agents’ heads. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, called the story “fiction,” and she’s right, the regime literally doctored a TikTok video made by a young Black man in Florida. His original post was about standing up to Iran, a goofy patriotic meme. Trump’s DHS stripped the context, slapped on cartel captions, and blasted it out under the label “F around and find out.”

Now, a kid who once lip-synced about Iran is being hunted online as a supposed cartel hitman. The same government that couldn’t track Jeffrey Epstein’s flights somehow found time to deepfake a teenager. It’s the old Trump playbook, take a Black face, invent a crime, and light the match. Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, moonlighting as Cory Lewandowski’s in-flight companion, just spent $172 million on new Gulfstream jets to tour the wreckage of American credibility. DHS doesn’t stand for “Homeland Security”; it stands for “Defamation, Hysteria, and Surveillance.”

Mexico’s president says she’s seen no evidence of any cartel bounties, and former DEA agents back her up. But the regime keeps the lie alive, the same way it’s kept alive the fiction that tariffs aren’t taxes, propaganda isn’t propaganda, and war crimes are just “policy.” Two survivors of Trump’s latest Caribbean “narco-terrorist” bombing have been conveniently deported to Ecuador and Colombia, not charged, not tried, not even interrogated in U.S. custody. Just quietly repatriated, which all but confirms there were no drugs, no contraband, no case, only bodies. If this were a legitimate interdiction, they’d be paraded in front of cameras as proof of Trump’s toughness. Instead, they’re being erased. Vanished faster than an Epstein witness list.

It feels like authoritarian improv, a bloody theater of distraction for a regime that has to invent its villains, whether through doctored TikToks or phantom drug wars. Every frame of it is funded by your tax-slash-surcharge dollars, rebranded by Treasury Secretary Bessent as “patriotic investment.” The message from this administration couldn’t be clearer: if the truth doesn’t fit the narrative, they’ll manufacture one, then bill you for the production.

And if the regime’s verbal video theater weren’t enough, they added live pyrotechnics. On Saturday, the Marines fired 155-millimeter artillery shells across Interstate 5 in Southern California, yes, across a freeway, as part of a “demonstration.” Drivers were rerouted while the state scrambled to shut sections of the highway. Governor Newsom called it a “profoundly absurd show of force,” which is a diplomatic way of saying they lost the plot. Nothing says “Happy 250th Anniversary” quite like lobbing high-explosives over commuters to prove the empire still has range.

And just when history seemed too on-the-nose, thieves in Paris decided to underline the metaphor: they broke into the Louvre and stole the Crown Jewels in seven minutes flat. Somewhere between the AI crown in Washington and the missing crown in Paris, the universe appears to be doing performance art.

Even abroad, the reaction is the same blend of laughter and disbelief. South Korean news shows feature split screens: Trump’s fighter-jet memes on one side, American crowds waving flags on the other. Commentators shake their heads and remind viewers that South Korea impeached its corrupt president without violence. “Ten million people in the streets,” one anchor said, “and it’s game over.” They see what we see: a republic rediscovering itself while its would-be emperor broadcasts from the digital oubliette he built for himself.

Back home, the contrast couldn’t be clearer. On one side, a movement of families, scientists, nurses, and artists marching in the open air, singing about freedom. On the other, a panic-stricken regime barricaded behind euphemisms, tariffs rebranded as “surcharges,” cover-ups disguised as “tradition,” fascism marketed as “patriotism with fizz.”

The air feels different now. The laughter and resolve in the streets is louder than the lies online. Even in small towns, the people are showing up, not out of rage, but relief. The monarchy is cracking, the masks are slipping, and somewhere a gilded elevator is missing its jewels.