Dear Readers:
So here we are again, surveying the week’s atrocities with all the enthusiasm of someone opening their credit card statement after the holidays.
Let’s begin with Tom Homan. Trump’s border czar—doesn’t that title just roll off the tongue like a threat—accepted fifty thousand dollars in cash from men he believed were businessmen seeking favors. They were FBI agents. The money came in a Cava bag. Not even a proper briefcase, mind you, just a takeout sack from a Mediterranean chain restaurant, because apparently corruption has stopped bothering with appearances altogether. Rather like wearing sweatpants to the opera, except the opera is our entire system of justice and the sweatpants are stuffed with evidence.
The FBI had cameras. They had recordings. Career prosecutors built what they believed was a perfectly serviceable bribery case. Then Trump won the election, learned about the investigation, and appointed Homan anyway. His Justice Department killed the case faster than you can say “obstruction.” The recordings still exist, locked away somewhere, gathering dust alongside our quaint notions about accountability. Homan now oversees billions in taxpayer dollars. The only real crime, it seems, was getting caught on tape while being insufficiently obsequious to Dear Leader.
Then there’s the matter of what we’re calling “peace” in Gaza, though one hesitates to dignify it with the term. Netanyahu needed it to stay out of prison—he’s facing corruption charges and an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, which is rather a lot even by modern political standards. Trump needed it for his Nobel Prize collection, because apparently being convicted of fraud in New York isn’t quite the same cachet. And Kushner, dear ambitious Kushner, looked at the smoldering ruins and saw waterfront property.
Sixty-seven thousand Palestinians are dead. Seventy percent of them women and children, if you’re keeping score, which apparently no one is. Trump possessed the power to intervene from the moment he took office in January. He waited until October. Waited while the death toll climbed and children starved and hospitals were bombed, waited until the optics became so poisonous even he couldn’t ignore them, waited until the stage was properly set for his grand entrance as peacemaker. The dead children weren’t casualties of war—they were set decoration for a vanity project.
Kushner’s contribution to this moral cesspool is something called the GREAT Trust plan, which offers displaced Palestinians digital tokens—digital tokens!—in exchange for their homes, and proposes luxury smart cities built atop the rubble of their destroyed lives. It’s ethnic cleansing with a PowerPoint presentation. Genocide with financial projections. One almost admires the audacity of calling it “development” when what you mean is erasure.
A generation of Palestinian children watched their world systematically destroyed while the rest of us watched on our phones between checking Instagram and ordering lunch. They’ll remember that. They’ll remember that we all saw, that we all knew, and that most of us did precisely nothing. But by all means, let’s talk about Trump’s Nobel chances.
Speaking of prizes, Susan Collins has won quite the jackpot. Maine’s perpetually furrowed-brow senator went from being nearly seven hundred thousand dollars in debt in 2011 to sitting on as much as eight million today. She married a lobbyist in 2012. Draw your own conclusions, though really, must we? They’re rather obvious.
Her masterpiece was voting for Trump’s tax cuts while her husband held over two million in stocks that would benefit magnificently from said cuts. Those investments potentially doubled—surged by up to six hundred thousand dollars—while Collins told her struggling constituents the bill would help working families. The performance was Oscar-worthy. The bank statements tell a different story, but then bank statements are so rarely consulted by voters who prefer their senators to maintain the fiction of relatability.
Then came Kavanaugh. Collins voted to confirm him after extracting promises that Roe was “settled law.” She’s since collected nearly two hundred thousand dollars from Federalist Society donors—the very organization that exists specifically to overturn Roe. When it fell, Collins expressed shock and betrayal, clutching her pearls with such vigor one worried for her circulation. As if she hadn’t known. As if we’re all that stupid. Trump administration officials later admitted they’d viewed her as an “easy mark.” They weren’t wrong.
The Young Republicans have been busy too, trading Hitler tributes and calling Black Americans “monkeys” across three thousand pages of Telegram messages. Twenty-eight thousand messages of systematic dehumanization, because apparently they’re very committed to their racism. These aren’t teenagers experimenting with forbidden language—they’re adults in their twenties and thirties, campaign operatives and government staffers, building their careers in the Republican Party by workshopping gas chamber jokes.
Vice President JD Vance—Yale Law School, federal clerkship, all that glittering education—dismissed it as “pearl clutching” over “kids” being “edgy.” He can’t condemn them because his political survival depends on not alienating the base that sees itself in those messages. So instead he defends them, positions accountability as the real problem, and pivots immediately to Democratic hypocrisy because two wrongs have always made a right in the moral universe inhabited by people without spines.
This is what the Republican pipeline produces now. This is the farm system. The poison flows exactly where the party wants it to flow, and Vance is standing there holding the tap open while assuring us it’s all perfectly normal, just boys being boys, nothing to see here.
And now we come to George Santos, who Trump freed after precisely eighty-four days in prison. Santos stole from elderly people with dementia. He fraudulently charged credit cards belonging to donors with brain damage. He admitted it. He pleaded guilty. A judge sentenced him to seven years. Trump commuted it because Santos voted with him one hundred percent of the time.
