Two Dolls and a Dictator: Trump’s America Is For Sale

While your kids settle for less, Trump cashes in on foreign deals, flouts court orders, and builds a surveillance state with Musk. Welcome to the gilded age of gaslighting.

Good morning from the land of gilded toilets and empty shelves, where the economy’s in freefall, the president’s face is held together with bronzer and delusion, and your kids better learn to love two dolls instead of thirty. It’s austerity with a smirk, and Donald Trump wants you to be grateful for the privilege of being fleeced.

Let’s start with the economy, or what’s left of it. GDP shrank in Q1, freight is collapsing, and the shelves are going bare as Trump’s 145% China tariffs strangle supply chains. But don’t worry. According to the president, the “kids can just have two dolls,” as if we’re all ungrateful brats begging for excess in a war economy. This isn’t just economic illiteracy, it’s a full-blown class war, dressed up as discipline. Trump’s trade reps admit there have been zero negotiations with China since “Liberation Day,” a.k.a. the day the Great Recession rebranded itself as freedom.

Meanwhile, while you're explaining to your children why Santa's on strike, Trump is in Qatar cutting yet another foreign real estate deal through the Trump Organization. Because nothing says "America First" like bankrolling a former president via petrostate payouts. Don Jr. and Dogecoin Dandy David Sacks have also launched the “Executive Branch Club,” a cozy $500,000 pay-to-play scheme for buyers of elite access. The grift is no longer shadowy or secret. It’s merchandised. You too can subscribe to oligarchy, just click “Add to Cart.”

Here on American soil, the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is boiling over. Judge Paula Xinis is no longer mincing words, she’s accusing the Trump administration of a “willful and bad faith refusal” to obey the courts. Garcia, it should be noted, was granted a work permit in 2019 by the Trump administration itself after an immigration judge determined he faced likely persecution if deported. But five years later, that same administration has dumped him into a Salvadoran prison, lied about it, and now refuses to bring him back. Xinis is ordering depositions, shredding privilege claims, and reminding the White House that court orders aren’t optional just because they don’t like the immigrant. And still, Trump shrugs. “I could call El Salvador,” he says. “But I’m not going to.”

And here’s where things get dangerously close to the breaking point. If Trump continues to flout the courts, who enforces the law? The U.S. Marshals Service now finds itself squarely in the crosshairs, torn between its constitutional duty to the judiciary and its bureaucratic leash to Trump’s Justice Department. His new Marshal nominee has promised to enforce “all lawful court orders,” but in a regime where facts are fungible and court rulings are treated like fan mail, “lawful” may soon mean whatever Trump’s lawyers can bluff with a straight face on Newsmax.

And speaking of creeping autocracy, let’s talk DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. While Musk’s clown car of tech bros fumbles through public blunders and budgetary black holes, one priority has remained crystal clear: data hoarding. Julia Angwin’s latest exposé details how DOGE is building a sprawling domestic surveillance system, vacuuming up personal data from the IRS, Social Security, and HHS to build a master database, a dossier state in the making. This is no longer a paranoid fantasy. According to whistleblowers, DOGE staff are walking out with backpacks full of laptops loaded with stolen agency data. Turnkey totalitarianism is no longer a warning, it’s a weekend project for Musk’s interns.

Overseas, the U.S. has struck a new minerals deal with Ukraine. On paper, it’s framed as support for postwar reconstruction. In practice, it looks more like a handshake over rare earths, lithium, and titanium, Washington securing first dibs while Ukraine supplies the dirt. The Ukrainians keep ownership and avoid debt traps, which is better than most American "aid" deals in recent memory. Still, locals in Ukraine’s mining regions are wary, and Russia’s Medvedev is already screeching about economic occupation. No word yet on whether Trump tried to rename the deal “Mine and Dine.”

Meanwhile, back in the States, Health Secretary RFK Jr. is taking a sledgehammer to vaccine policy. His new rule would force all vaccines, including those against well-understood diseases, to undergo placebo-controlled trials, a move experts say could delay life-saving treatments and erode public trust. It’s like demanding crash tests for seatbelts in 2025 because your cousin on Facebook says they’re a hoax. Oh, and Florida is planning to ban fluoride in drinking water. Because nothing says “public health” like making sure the poor get cavities.

And finally, Elon Musk may, or may not, be out as CEO of Tesla. The Wall Street Journal says yes. Musk, in all-caps on X, says no. Whatever the truth, Tesla stock is down, investors are rattled, and the world’s richest man is tweeting like a caffeinated raccoon trapped in a dumpster fire.

That’s your America today: a collapsing economy framed as self-improvement, government data turned into a weapon, court orders treated like junk mail, and a ruling class so confident in their impunity they’re selling elite memberships like they’re bottle service at Mar-a-Lago.