Weekend at Donny’s: A Labor Day of Sewage, Scandals, and Silence

Beaches closed by fecal contamination, unions fighting for survival, diseases creeping north, the CDC gutted, Pam Bondi running a family-and-friends DOJ, and a president trying to prove he’s alive

Good morning! Labor Day in America, 2025. A holiday meant to honor the working class, and what better way to do that than by shutting down the beaches because the water’s literally full of crap. From Maine to Florida, from Michigan’s lakes to San Diego’s surf, the advice was the same: don’t swim unless you want E. coli in your gut, rashes on your skin, or worse. Silver Strand, Coronado, Santa Monica, Hermosa, all closed. It turns out you can’t keep sewage, animal waste, or cyanobacteria out of the water when the nation’s infrastructure is rotting alongside its politics. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 57 million Americans get sick each year from swimming in contaminated water. Consider it the true national pastime: spending Labor Day weekend with your head in the toilet.

But while Americans are told to stay out of the water, Xi Jinping is busy hosting a literal hand-holding ceremony in Tianjin. He clasped paws with Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, calling for an “orderly multipolar world” while Trump sulks in Washington. China pledged another billion in loans, floated a development bank, and staged the optics of chumminess that Trump could never buy with tariffs. The summit wasn’t about substance so much as optics: leaders from Russia, Iran, India, and beyond standing together, smiling, while America’s global influence fades like sunscreen in sewage surf. It’s the sort of soft-power judo move Beijing loves, no great deal signed, just a perfectly staged photo op that says: we’re united, America’s a mess.

Back home, Labor Day for workers was less celebration and more funeral procession. Unions in California gathered under helicopters and ICE raids, remembering colleagues killed while fleeing federal agents. SEIU’s David Huerta was injured and detained while documenting a raid, a vivid reminder that even labor leaders are fair game. Trump’s administration, never one to miss a chance at cruelty, gutted collective bargaining for federal unions, gutted the National Labor Relations Board, and celebrated a “Big Beautiful Bill” that strips healthcare from millions while growing ICE. Caregivers who spent decades tending to veterans and the disabled now face layoffs and benefit cuts, while major hospitals slash staff and services under the weight of Trump’s budget knife. As one labor historian put it, the movement is fighting for survival. Labor Day isn’t a picnic; it’s a wake.

A new old threat creeps closer. Chagas disease, once written off as a tropical affliction of “somewhere else,” is now quietly endemic across 30 U.S. states, with California leading the way. The parasite spreads via the kissing bug, which doesn’t discriminate between poor farmworkers and wealthy Hollywood Hills homeowners. Between 70,000 and 100,000 Californians are already infected, most unaware until their first “symptom” is a heart attack. Dogs get it, raccoons get it, wood rats and skunks get it, and yes, people get it, often discovered only when they try to donate blood. But because it’s not a reportable disease in most states, there’s no system, no surveillance, no plan. America can’t even keep sewage out of the surf, let alone track a parasite silently spreading through its own suburbs.

And then there’s the CDC, once the crown jewel of American public health, now reduced to a political husk. Last week, its top scientists resigned en masse in protest after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top conspiracy theorist turned HHS Secretary, turned the agency into a prop for Trump’s political theater. The chief medical officer, the heads of immunization and emerging diseases, the directors of surveillance and statistics, all gone. They walked out to cheers from their colleagues, but the applause was a requiem. Without their recommendations, vaccines no longer carry automatic insurance coverage, turning basic immunization into a luxury item. Measles outbreaks are back, flu spikes go underreported, COVID still simmers. Wealthy families will pay out of pocket; poor families will get sick. The diseases of poverty are poverty itself. As doctors Ida Brown and Sonia Sloan said: this isn’t philosophical, lives are on the line. And while the agency collapses, Trump brags about “making America healthy again” through the sheer force of RFK Jr.’s vibes.

And because no American holiday is complete without a fresh scandal, enter Pam Bondi, Trump’s handpicked attorney general and longtime grifter-in-chief. Bondi, you’ll remember, once dropped Florida out of the Trump University fraud suit after pocketing donations from Trump and Ivanka. Now, as head of the Department of Justice, she’s apparently turned the place into a family discount outlet.

Two of her brother Brad Bondi’s clients, a Missouri developer accused of wire fraud and a Florida woman charged with COVID relief theft, had their indictments mysteriously dropped by DOJ prosecutors. No new exculpatory evidence, no legal breakthroughs, just… dismissed. In Missouri, the defendant simply paid back the taxes he had cheated the government out of, and poof, case closed. It was the kind of sweetheart deal no ordinary defendant could dream of. Meanwhile, Trevor Milton, another of Brad Bondi’s clients, convicted of securities fraud, received a Trump pardon in March. If you’re keeping score: steal millions, hire Pam’s brother, get your charges wiped away or a presidential pardon.

It’s a system only a Bondi could love: one law for insiders, another for everyone else. And the supposed nation’s top law enforcement officer hasn’t even bothered to put guardrails in place to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, let alone the reality. For career DOJ attorneys still trying to do their jobs, it’s demoralizing. For the rest of us, it’s proof, as if we needed more, that under Trump, justice really is for sale, and the family discount applies.

And what of the man himself? On Labor Day, Trump’s public schedule was a blank page, a fitting metaphor for his presidency. Over the weekend he tried to prove he was alive with a series of awkward posts: a photo in “the Beast,” another on the golf course, and one with disgraced ex-NFL coach John Gruden. But the Gruden photo turned out to be a rerun from August 23rd, with Gruden in the same outfit he’d already posted. The handshake looked AI-scrubbed. MAGA influencers circulated months-old clips as “breaking news.” It was less a presidency than a poorly managed Instagram account.

Trump’s posts grew weirder: an email about how he “came millimeters from death” and “wants to get to heaven,” a boast about $15 trillion in imaginary foreign investment (not a penny to show for it), and a claim that prices are “way down” while Americans pay more than ever at the store. He even declared DC a “crime-free zone,” which will come as news to the Secret Service still cleaning up broken windows. For good measure, he posted a painting of himself engulfed in flames with the caption “America is hot.” Proof of life? More like a funeral pyre selfie.

So here we are: a Labor Day defined by sewage beaches, dying unions, neglected diseases, a collapsing CDC, and a president trying to convince the country he’s still breathing with recycled golf photos and bad Photoshop. If this isn’t the metaphor for America in 2025, what is? The water’s unsafe, the health system’s leaderless, the working class is under siege, and the commander-in-chief is either hiding, hallucinating, or both. Happy Labor Day, America. Don’t forget your hazmat suit.