Parallel reality: Trump's plot to airbrush history weeks before the election

U.S. President Donald Trump with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 16, 2026.

— Six Justices Just Handed Trump a Voter-Purge Machine, but Told Him to Wait Until the Next Election to Use It. Yesterday, the six corrupt Republican ideologues on the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to let the Trump regime go forward with their plan to create a national database of Trump-approved, GOP-approved voters that they intend to then force upon the states in violation of the Constitution. This overturned a June ruling from Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who found the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.”

The GOP’s SAVE database was first built in 1986 to provide information on Social Security applicants and their benefits and Republicans now want to use it to solve the non-existent problem of non-citizen voting. The system is clunky and badly flawed, and, as Democracy Docket points out, naturalized citizens are often latecomers to the system so they keep getting flagged and canceled. Given that the majority of naturalized citizens since we lifted racial/national origin quotas in 1965 have been non-white people, they’re exactly the folks Republicans don’t want to vote, so in the GOP’s way of thinking this is just fine.

Justice Jackson, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, wrote that disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the “nonexistent harm” to a government doing something it likely lacks the authority to do (the Constitution gives voting to the states, not the feds). The unsigned Republican majority opinion — none of the on-the-take Republicans was willing to put his or her name on it — did helpfully note that federal law bars systematic purges in the 90 days before an election, which “limits the potential impact” this year.

Translation: the GOP national voter purge machine is now legal, it just has to idle until the presidential election in 2028, which will determine whether the next crop of SCOTUS nominees will come from a Republican or a Democratic president. Marc Elias called it “a dangerous decision for voters.”

Meanwhile, the same Justice Department is dispatching more than 1,000 “monitors” to polling places in what Harmeet Dhillon proudly calls the “biggest DOJ election observer effort in history.” CNN found that several of the “monitors” DOJ hired during this year’s primaries were Republican partisans who’d helped challenge Trump’s 2020 loss, and one even has pleaded guilty to illegally accessing a government elections website in 2016.

Even Wyoming’s Republican officials complained that the feds’ intrusions into their election systems were disruptive and weirdly fixated on the voting machines. Nothing says “election integrity” quite like sending convicted hackers and Stop-the-Steal alumni to hover over the ballot scanners. Vote early, check your registration, and bring a friend.

— Money In, Regulation Out: How $50 Million Bought the AI Industry a Get-Out-of-Oversight-Free Card. Back on September 11, 2024 the Biden Commerce Department proposed requiring AI companies to tell the government what they’re building and how it’s working. It wasn’t regulation, but it could have laid the foundation for that. Then, as The Lever points out, the checks being written to Trump and his family started clearing the bank and suddenly the proposed rule was simply abandoned.

A company tied to Sam Altman gave Trump’s personal MAGA Inc. SuperPAC $5 million in January 2025; Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz kicked in $9 million that March; Elon Musk added another $5 million in June. In September 2025, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife wrote MAGA Inc. a $25 million check, and — surprise! — less than three months later the rule was quietly withdrawn from the federal regulatory agenda.

So much for the industry’s claims that they want federal regulation; it appears that they just want rules onerous enough to keep out smaller competitors.

In the year since, OpenAI’s own bots broke into the Australian government’s website and, asked what guardrails the industry needs, Trump explained that the only guardrail required is a “strong and smart (High IQ!) president.” So we’re covered, then. This is Roberts’ and Clarence Thomas’ sordid Citizens United legalized bribery system working exactly as designed: the people building the most dangerous technology in human history simply pay $50 million for the privilege of not having to tell anybody what they’re doing with it.

— Americans Feel Worse About the Economy Than at Almost Any Time Since Harry Truman, and Trump Wants to Know Why Nobody’s Grateful. The University of Michigan has been measuring consumer sentiment annually since 1952, and this year came in the second-lowest during that entire history; only Harry Truman was worse, at the peak of the Korean War. In other words, Americans are more pessimistic today than they were during Vietnam, the 1970s oil shock, 9/11, the Great Recession, and even the deadly pandemic.

The reasons are both obvious and subtle: obvious causes include gas and diesel prices spiking because of Trump’s war with Iran, tariffs pushing prices up, mortgage rates are back above 7 percent, and the Fed just raised interest rates again. The subtle reason probably has more to do with Americans realizing — with horror — that Trump and the Republicans have been lying to them for years while feathering their own nests at the expense of the working class.

This is what 45 years of Reaganomics looks like as we approach what may well be the end of the neoliberal road, and as the last bill for trickle-down finally comes due the guy who could do something about it is spending his evenings in his bedroom with Natalie generating heroic AI pictures of himself.

— JD Vance Found 760,000 “Phantoms” on Obamacare. Funny How Many of Them Are Just Poor People. We all buy insurance and we all hope we’ll not need to use it; apparently nobody ever shared that insight with JD Vance or vitamin-hustler Dr. Oz. This week they threw 760,000 people off the Affordable Care Act plans and are examining another 419,000 people, an act they say will “save” America $2.2 billion.

Bizarrely, Oz declared, “These are not real people.” His evidence? About 35 percent of dumped enrollees never used their insurance, which he said was “just not possible.” Anybody who’s ever paid a premium and stayed healthy knows that’s the best outcome any of us can hope for. They’re reportedly using AI to flag these people, apparently looking for minor paperwork slipups, and also going after people in the Red states that didn’t expand eligibility for Obamacare.

Georgetown’s Edwin Park pointed out the whole design is to “make it incredibly burdensome” to stay covered. Nearly 3 million people have already lost marketplace coverage since Republicans let the subsidies expire with their Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare, so they’re just starving it, one “ghost” family at a time.

— Test Scores Hit a 25-Year Low. Trump’s Answer — Just Like With His Economic Numbers — Was to Fire the People Who Count Them. American kids’ reading and math performance has fallen to its lowest point in a quarter century, in part because the federal agency built to help our schools and students has been gutted. When DOGE canceled nearly $900 million in Education Department contracts last year, the National Center for Education Statistics, the agency that produces The Nation’s Report Card, went from about 100 employees to four. It’s now up to a dozen.

Peggy Carr, the commissioner fired after nearly four decades there, says the most painful loss was the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a $47 million project tracking 15,000 kindergartners who started school in 2023, the first cohort born after Covid. Musk’s pimply-faced boys killed it midstream, so the most expensive part of the study had already been paid for but the data is now gone forever. Same story with a study that followed 23,000 ninth graders from 2009 into their thirties, canceled in its final lap. We then had to pay millions in termination fees to the contractors. Now that the main education push from the GOP is to sell vouchers and post the Ten Commandments in classrooms, it’s easy to figure out why Republicans would want the agency that lets us know how our kids are doing to be hobbled or even killed off, as the billionaire wrestling promoter in charge of our Education Department, Linda McMahon, appears committed to doing.

When Trump said he loved “the uneducated” he was dead serious.

— Trump’s FDA Pick Can’t Say Whether an IUD Is an Abortion. That’s Not a Slip, It’s the Plan. Dr. Heidi Overton, the White House domestic policy adviser Trump nominated to run the FDA after Marty Makary bailed, sat before the Senate HELP Committee on Thursday and flat-out refused to answer a simple yes-or-no question.

Sen. Patty Murray noted that last year the administration labeled contraception “abortifacient birth control” while destroying $10 million in contraceptives including IUDs meant for women overseas, then asked Overton point-blank whether an IUD causes an abortion. Overton pivoted to “food safety pillars.” Murray asked again. Overton said she’d be “fully briefed on all their prior decisions” if confirmed. Murray then correctly pointed out that an FDA commissioner who doesn’t know birth control isn’t the same thing as an abortion is “deeply alarming.” With that, Murray was being way too polite dealing with this naked liar: Overton knows perfectly well what an IUD does; she coauthored a 2023 paper for Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute calling the abortion pill mifepristone “dangerous to women” despite more than 100 studies saying otherwise, and she told senators she’s also open to investigating the pill’s manufacturers.

Even Republican Josh Hawley and Republican Chairman Bill Cassidy came away unimpressed.

The theocrats have already succeeded in outlawing legal abortion in half the country; contraception is the their next (and longtime) target, and the way they’ll get there is by installing someone at FDA who’ll “review” the science until it says what these rightwing so-called “Christians” want. Trump went to his Nazi-infested social media site and called her a “ROCKSTAR.” Call your senators at 202-224-3121 and let them know what you think.

— Geeky Science!Your Aging Brain Isn’t Failing, It’s Being Promoted. Every time you walk into a room and forget why, you’ve probably chalked it up to age-related decline in mental faculties, but a new paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science from the University of Arizona argues that’s the wrong story for us to tell ourselves. Drawing on molecular biology and neuroimaging, Fabian-Xosé Fernandez, Sara Burke, and Lynn Nadel propose an “adaptive aging hypothesis”: their hypothesis is that late life is an actual developmental stage, not a slow-motion breakdown.

The hippocampus, the one-day scratchpad in our brain that captures the fine-grained details of an experience, gradually hands off those details to the frontal cortex, which specializes in gist, meaning, and the big picture. A younger brain needs to hoard the day’s details because it has no reference library; an older brain has a vast store of knowledge so instead of noticing details it instead tries to put them into historical context to understand their meaning.

That trade-off, the authors argue, is exactly what makes older adults “wise” and thus well-suited for the traditional elder roles of mentoring, teaching, and storytelling. “If we look at normative aging as a story of just decline, we are really missing the boat,” Fernandez told the Association for Psychological Science.

The Washington Post has a good summary of the thinking. This is a hypothesis paper, not a clinical trial, and the authors point out that Alzheimer’s appears to hijack exactly this transition, giving even more credence to their concept. Older cultures universally respect their “wise elders”; it’s long past time that we stop discounting the wisdom that comes with age.

— Crazy Alert!Trump Posted an AI Picture of Xi’s Arrival and Somehow Lost His Own Wife. On Thursday, as Xi Jinping’s plane landed at Joint Base Andrews, Trump (or Natalie) posted an image on his Nazi-infested failing social media site of himself saluting stoically beside the Chinese president while a bomber roared overhead. The only problem is that the actual video shows Melania Trump and Xi’s wife Peng Liyuan standing right there with them. In Trump’s/Natalie’s version, however, both first ladies have vanished. The one woman who survived the edit is a blonde with her hand over her heart, which set the internet on fire with the theory that Natalie Harp had erased Melania and inserted herself.

Fact-checkers say that the figure in question is actually the chief of protocol Monica Crowley, who posted her own photos from the tarmac, though Aaron Rupar argued her face appears to have been altered to make her look an awful lot like Harp. No explanation from the White House. This is, of course, nothing new for strongman dictators: Stalin routinely airbrushed his enemies out of photographs.

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