The Record

Let's be clear about what happened here. In May 2025, former FBI Director James Comey posted a photo on Instagram of seashells arranged to read "86 47." He deleted it shortly after. He said he didn't realize some people associate "86" with violence. That's the whole story. A photo. On Instagram. Of seashells.

Nearly a year later — after a full federal investigation, grand jury proceedings, and months of prosecutorial work — the Trump DOJ indicted Comey on two counts: threatening the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. Up to ten years in prison. For seashells.

Todd Blanche — who was Trump's personal defense attorney in his criminal trial before being installed as Acting Attorney General — held a press conference to announce this. The man who once argued Trump was the victim of political prosecution is now the man running the political prosecution. He called it "the result of a lot of work by law enforcement over the past year." He insisted, with a straight face, that Trump didn't direct him to do it. "Absolutely, positively not," Blanche said.

Here's the thing about the timing. On the exact same day the Comey indictment was announced, a federal judge in New York ruled that Maurene Comey — James Comey's daughter, a career federal prosecutor who prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sean Combs — can proceed with her lawsuit against the Trump administration for firing her without cause or notice in July 2025. The judge found she was fired solely because of her last name. "She was given one and only one reason for her removal: Article II of the Constitution," he wrote. No cause. No process. No reason except that her father is a Trump enemy.

So on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, the Trump administration indicted the father and lost in court on the daughter — in the same news cycle. If you needed a cleaner illustration of what this is, you're not going to get one.

Trump said during the 2024 campaign that he was tired of lawfare and had no desire to take revenge on anybody. He is now on his second attempt to imprison a man for a beach photo while firing that man's daughter for having the wrong last name. His personally selected Attorney General is announcing the charges. He had no desire to take revenge on anybody.

This is what revenge looks like when the person doing it has the full machinery of the Justice Department. It's not subtle. It's not complicated. It is the sitting president using federal prosecutors as a weapon against a private citizen who criticized him — and doing it twice, because the first time didn't work. The precedent being set here is one of the most dangerous in American history. If a seashell photo is a criminal indictment, what isn't?

Best of luck to our troops. I mean that. They didn't start this war, they didn't name it "Operation Epic Fury" like it's a WWE pay-per-view, and they didn't ask to be sent to the Middle East on the basis of justifications that keep changing. The people responsible for putting them there owe them the truth. They are not getting it.

The war began February 28, 2026, when the US and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran. At the time, Iran was making unprecedented concessions in negotiations. The Pentagon subsequently stated there was no imminent threat from Iran. Trump had campaigned on not fighting endless wars. He named this one after a Marvel villain.

The Intercept — one of the few outlets doing real reporting on this — found through its own analysis that the Pentagon has been sending outdated casualty figures, resulting in systematic undercounts. At least 15 US troops have died. More than 520 have been wounded. The Pentagon's own numbers kept fluctuating — 385 total casualties on the day of the ceasefire, then 428, then 413, then 411 — with no explanation for the changes. One soldier, Maj. Sorffly Davius, who died of sudden illness while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury, was missing from the Pentagon's casualty rolls entirely. His congressman memorialized him. The Joint Chiefs chair honored him by name. The Pentagon ignored requests for comment on why he wasn't counted.

When the first three deaths were reported, Trump told NBC News: "We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it's going to be a great deal for the world." He was asked about dead American soldiers and responded with a cost-benefit analysis. Then he added: "That's the way it is." That's the way it is.

Then Pete Hegseth held a Pentagon briefing and criticized the media for "only wanting to make the president look bad" by covering the dead. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs then stood at the same podium and immediately memorialized the fallen by name. In the same press conference. Two men. Two completely different ideas about what those deaths mean. One of them is the Defense Secretary.

Only 36% of Americans say the military operations are going successfully, according to CBS News polling. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand asked Hegseth directly: "Why do you continue to prosecute a war that the American people aren't behind?" He said he believes "we do have the support of the American people." He believes this. The poll says 36%.

These are our kids. These are other people's kids. They deserve a government that tells us the truth about why they're there, what's happening to them, and how many of them aren't coming home. What we're getting instead is Pete Hegseth complaining about the press while the general behind him reads the names of the dead. I'm angry about this in a way that doesn't have a bottom. Every administration lies about war. But most of them pretend to feel something about the cost. This one called it "Epic Fury" and moved on.

Let's get the sequence right, because the sequence matters. Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House — without asking Congress, without authorization, against the objections of historic preservation groups, against a court ruling that called it unlawful — to build a nearly 90,000 square foot ballroom for himself. That happened first. Months before April 25.

On April 25, 2026, a gunman attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents' Dinner at the Washington Hilton. He was one floor above the ballroom. Hundreds of federal agents were between him and the president. He was tackled before reaching anyone. A Secret Service agent who was struck was wearing a vest and is expected to be fine. Within two minutes of the incident, Trump was already framing it as proof that he needed his ballroom.

"This would never have happened with the planned security measures I intend to include," he said. He said this about a shooting that occurred one floor above the ballroom where he was seated, which did not reach him, which was stopped by the existing security apparatus. He had barely been escorted to safety before he started using the incident as a real estate argument.

The DOJ — fresh off indicting Jim Comey for seashells — sent a letter to the lawyers challenging the ballroom's construction telling them their case "serves no purpose" now. They suggested the White House Correspondents' Association could just hold future dinners at Trump's ballroom. Journalists covering the president. In a ballroom owned and controlled by the president. People who study press freedom were not enthusiastic.

AOC pointed out that Trump demolished the East Wing long before any incident. Hakeem Jeffries called it a "vanity project." The WHCA president has not indicated any interest in holding the dinner at a venue controlled by the person the dinner historically roasts. The Washington Post noted that Trump's own proposed ballroom can't actually solve the security issues he's citing — the perimeter would still be a hotel, still be open to guests, still have the same fundamental vulnerabilities.

He tore down part of the White House for himself. A judge said stop. He didn't stop. Now something scary happened at a different building and he's saying it proves he was right to tear down the thing the judge told him to stop tearing down. And the influencers and Republican legislators parroting the "national defense" argument know exactly how stupid it is. They know. They're saying it anyway. Which makes them accessories to the grift, not its victims. Screw the ballroom. Rebuild the East Wing.

The new US passport features a scowling Donald Trump — his second inaugural portrait, the one where he looks like a man who just found out someone ate his steak — superimposed over the Declaration of Independence, with his signature rendered in gold. A Georgetown University passport historian called the decision "wacky." He noted that no foreign passport has ever featured the head of state of any country. No modern US passport has ever featured a sitting president. This is a first in American history, and also in world history, and the word for it begins with N and ends in arcissism.

It doesn't stop at the passport. His face is on the national park passes — replacing photos of actual national parks that were selected through a public contest — next to George Washington. His signature is being added to US paper currency, the first time a sitting president's signature will appear on money; federal law prohibits living persons on the currency itself, so they put his name on it instead. His name is on the Kennedy Center now — The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts — over the objections of the Kennedy family. His name is on the US Institute of Peace. A new class of battleships is the "Trump class." A new fighter jet is the F-47. There is a TrumpRx.gov website for prescription drugs.

This country has a tradition, going back to the founding, of not doing this. The men on our currency — Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin — are all dead. They were chosen because they built something that outlasted them and that history judged. The rule about not putting living people on money exists specifically because the founders were thinking of kings and emperors who covered their kingdoms with their own faces. They found that behavior embarrassing. They wrote a revolution to get away from it.

If things are so great — if the crowds love him, if the legacy is secure, if history will vindicate — then wait. Let history do it. The fanfare in the immediate aftermath of a truly great leader's tenure doesn't need to be manufactured with gold signatures on passports. It arrives on its own. The fact that it needs to be stamped onto every surface before the term is even over is the tell. You don't engrave your own face on things when you're confident posterity will do it for you.

I'm pretty pissed about this. This country has never adored the image of anyone on anything official. Not a living person, and not even dead ones without extraordinary reason. The Founding Fathers on the money earned it by dying 200 years ago after building a republic. This man is putting his scowling face on passports while the republic is still here, still trying to decide if it wants to stay that way. The kiss-asses cheering this don't realize they're being fleeced. They're paying with their dignity to applaud a man who is essentially redecorating the country with himself because he can. Orange Jesus can wait. History will have plenty to say without the gold ink.

The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — PEPFAR — was created in 2003 by George W. Bush. It is widely considered one of the most successful foreign aid programs in American history, credited by UNAIDS with saving 26 million lives over two decades. Last year alone it provided life-saving HIV antiretroviral medication to 20.6 million people. The vast majority of those people are in Africa. This is a George W. Bush program. It has had bipartisan support for twenty years.

Trump and Musk dismantled USAID — the agency that implemented PEPFAR — in January 2025. Musk called it feeding the agency "into the woodchipper." The foreign aid freeze that followed disrupted PEPFAR operations across more than 50 countries. Of the $6 billion appropriated by Congress for PEPFAR in 2025, only $2.9 billion has been released. Clinics have closed. Workers have lost their jobs. Supply chains for antiretroviral drugs have collapsed in some regions.

In Mozambique, HIV testing is no longer available in most parts of the country. In Tanzania and Kenya, thousands of health workers have lost their jobs. In Zimbabwe, diagnostic and treatment services for pregnant women and children have been disrupted. In South Africa — which has 8 million people living with HIV, 5.5 million of whom rely on PEPFAR-supported antiretroviral treatment every single day — rural clinics have closed. PEPFAR funded nearly 20 percent of South Africa's entire $2.3 billion annual HIV program.

One study estimates that ending PEPFAR funding could result in 565,000 new HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa over ten years, and reduce the life expectancy of people already living with HIV by nearly four years. That's not a projection from an advocacy group. That's a peer-reviewed modeling study.

They knew this. This is not a case of unintended consequences. The people who cut PEPFAR knew what PEPFAR was. They knew what it did. They knew who it served. The people it serves are predominantly Black Africans. They cut it smilingly, called it government efficiency, and moved on. Elon Musk used the word "woodchipper" and thought it was clever. Twenty-six million lives over twenty years, and he called it a woodchipper.

I'm outraged by this. Not abstractly outraged — specifically, concretely outraged. A program started by a Republican president, kept alive by Democrats and Republicans for twenty years, was dismantled by a man who said "woodchipper" with a smirk. The people dying because of this decision are overwhelmingly Black Africans. That is not a coincidence. They knew who PEPFAR served when they cut it. They knew what would happen. They made the choice anyway. And the people applauding it — the ones talking about efficiency and sovereignty and not sending money overseas — should be made to say out loud what they're actually applauding. Because what they're applauding is this: a 16-year-old in Eswatini who stopped taking his medication because nobody comes to pick him up anymore.

The Republican Party has spent forty years telling you it is the party of fiscal responsibility. Balanced budgets. Small government. Taxpayer protection. Every Democrat who wanted to expand healthcare or fund infrastructure was met with: Who is going to pay for this? The answer, apparently, is the same people who are paying for all of this.

The Congressional Budget Office found that the Republican tax bill would add trillions to the national debt. Trump attacked the CBO. Senator Tim Scott — the Banking Committee chair — introduced a provision to defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau through the same bill. The provision was ruled invalid. The CFPB, by the way, is the agency that gets money back for ordinary Americans when banks rip them off. They tried to kill it in a tax bill.

Meanwhile, PEPFAR — a program that costs roughly $6 billion a year and saves millions of lives — is being gutted for efficiency. The Iran War, which nobody has put a price tag on, is ongoing. The ballroom, which a judge said is being built unlawfully, is under construction. The lawsuits are multiplying. The bill is going to come due, and the people who will be asked to pay it will be the same people who were told for decades that the other party was too expensive.

Lawsuits. Stupid settlements. Military adventures. Foreign bailouts. Vanity projects on federal property. An unauthorized ballroom on the ruins of a historic wing of the White House. A war called "Epic Fury" with no cost estimate and a casualty count that changes daily. And through all of it, the same people who screamed about the deficit for forty years are silent. Not confused. Not conflicted. Silent. Because it was never about the deficit. It was about whose spending it was. This jackass has been in office for one term — two terms — and the bill is already staggering. When it comes due, remember who ran it up.