EDITORIAL NOTE

This is a pretty simple exercise. President Donald Trump used Labor Day to tell American workers his government is fighting for them, so Off Script checked that statement against White House documents, Labor Department actions, National Labor Relations Board records, and a federal appeals court decision. The evidence comes largely from his own government.

The nice thing about receipts is that they don’t care which party you voted for.

Labor Day ended a few hours ago. Apparently the holiday has a return policy.

On Monday, Trump issued the traditional presidential Labor Day proclamation, praising the “hard work, dedication, and unwavering commitment of the American worker.” Then came the sentence worth keeping: “The American worker deserves a Government that is determined to fight for them … and we are delivering.” That gives us something considerably more useful than another holiday speech full of flags and adjectives. It gives us a claim we can check.

So let’s check it.

WHAT TRUMP SAID

The White House makes its case largely through the economy. Trump points to tax cuts, tariffs, manufacturing investment, more than 900,000 jobs and six consecutive months of manufacturing expansion. He also argues that his trade policies and proposed H-1B changes protect American workers from foreign competition. Those are the administration’s chosen measurements of a government fighting for workers.

They belong in the conversation. A worker who lands a good factory job isn’t going to care that somebody on television dislikes the president who was in office when the plant opened. Jobs matter, wages matter, and domestic investment matters.

So does what happens after you punch the clock.

If the government says it is fighting for workers, bargaining power, wage protections, and the ability to keep a job seem like reasonable places to look.

RECEIPT NO. 1: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

In March 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14251, removing federal collective-bargaining requirements from a sweeping group of agencies and subdivisions. The affected workforce stretched through Defense, Veterans Affairs, State, Treasury, Justice and other parts of the federal government. Six unions representing roughly 800,000 civilian federal employees challenged the order.

The administration invoked national security, authority presidents do possess under federal law. A Ninth Circuit panel later vacated a preliminary injunction that had blocked the order, concluding that the unions had not shown at that stage that they were likely to prevail on their retaliation argument. That legal context matters because this isn’t a claim that Trump simply woke up one morning and illegally abolished unions.

Then you read the White House’s own explanation.

Its March 2025 fact sheet complained that certain federal unions had “declared war on President Trump’s agenda” and accused them of using grievances and litigation to obstruct administration policies. The White House said Trump supported unions willing to work constructively with him and would not tolerate what it called “mass obstruction.” That language makes the policy considerably harder to sell as a simple national-security housekeeping measure.

You can believe the president had the statutory authority and still ask who gained power from using it. Management did. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost bargaining protections they previously had.

That belongs on the receipt.

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RECEIPT NO. 2: THE FEDERAL CONTRACTOR WAGE FLOOR

Then there’s money.

In March 2025, Trump revoked President Biden’s Executive Order 14026, which had established a higher minimum-wage requirement for workers performing on or in connection with certain federal contracts. The Labor Department’s current guidance is unusually plain about the result. It says the department “is no longer enforcing Executive Order 14026” or its implementing rule.

That doesn’t mean every federal contractor suddenly slashed wages. Other wage laws and contract requirements remain, and some covered contracts fall under an older federal contractor wage order. For 2026, that older system establishes a $13.65 hourly minimum for covered non-tipped workers.

The policy choice is still obvious. A federal wage protection existed, and Trump removed it.

You can defend that as deregulation. You can argue Washington shouldn’t dictate a higher wage to companies doing business with the government. You can even argue that the old requirement distorted labor costs.

Just put it on the same table with the Labor Day speech.

RECEIPT NO. 3: WHEN THE CONTRACT CHANGES HANDS

Here’s one that received considerably less attention.

Under a Biden-era rule covering certain federal service contracts, an incoming contractor generally had to give qualified workers from the previous contractor the right of first refusal for jobs on the new contract. It wasn’t a lifetime employment guarantee. It meant the people already doing the work got a chance to keep doing it when Washington changed the company name at the top of the contract.

Trump revoked the executive order behind that protection on his first day back in office. In December 2025, the Labor Department rescinded the regulation itself, fully removing the requirement. The department’s own announcement described the action as restoring flexibility to contractors and subcontractors.

There’s a policy argument there too. A company taking over a federal contract may want complete freedom to build its own workforce. Employers got that freedom.

Workers lost the preference that had helped them keep their jobs.

When we’re grading who the government is fighting for, that seems worth mentioning.

RECEIPT NO. 4: THE LABOR BOARD THAT COULDN’T DECIDE LABOR CASES

The National Labor Relations Board exists to enforce the federal law protecting most private-sector employees who organize, bargain collectively or act together over workplace conditions. In January 2025, Trump removed Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox before her Senate-confirmed term expired. Her removal left the board without the quorum it needed to decide contested cases.

The agency’s own numbers show what followed. During fiscal 2025, the board issued only 86 contested decisions, a 67 percent decline from the previous year. Pending cases jumped 92 percent, from 288 to 552, and the backlog of unfair-labor-practice and representation cases awaiting board decisions reached 129.

Most of the NLRB’s routine work continued during the quorum gap. Regional offices still processed cases, conducted elections and settled the overwhelming majority of meritorious complaints, so saying the entire agency shut down would be wrong. The problem hit cases that actually required a board decision.

Trump later nominated James Murphy and Scott Mayer; the Senate confirmed them, and the NLRB regained a quorum on January 7, 2026. It has since added another member and currently has four. The board works again.

The backlog didn’t materialize because somebody at MSNBC said so.

It’s in the NLRB’s own annual report.

SO WHAT DOES “FIGHTING FOR WORKERS” ACTUALLY MEAN?

This is where the argument usually turns into team sports.

Trump supporters can point to tariffs, manufacturing policy, immigration restrictions, tax cuts, and domestic investment and argue that those policies put American workers ahead of foreign competitors and multinational companies. The Labor Day proclamation makes exactly that case. There are workers who will judge the administration primarily by whether jobs came back to their town or whether their paycheck improved.

That record has another side.

The administration restricted collective bargaining across large parts of the federal workforce. It revoked a higher federal contractor minimum-wage order. It removed a job-retention preference for workers on certain federal service contracts. Its removal of an NLRB member also left the board unable to decide contested cases for most of 2025, contributing to a backlog documented by the agency itself.

I don’t need to tell you whether Donald Trump cares about workers. I don’t know what’s inside his head, and neither does anybody else filling three hours of cable television pretending they do. Policies leave a much cleaner trail.

On Labor Day, Trump told American workers his government was determined to fight for them.

After reading the receipts, I’m left with the same question workers have been asking bosses forever:

Doing what, exactly?

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

The three-day weekend is over. The bullshit apparently worked straight through it.

THE CLAIM:

Michael Whatley says grocery prices, gasoline prices, and housing prices are down, and that there’s “no inflation.”

Bullshit, at least the way the current campaign ad presents it.

Roy Cooper’s North Carolina Senate campaign really does use Whatley’s own words. Several of those comments, however, came from July 2025, when the economic numbers were different, while Whatley’s separate January 2026 claim that there was “no inflation” was simply wrong. FactCheck.org found the new ad uses dated remarks as though Whatley were describing the economy today, turning a legitimate affordability argument into something considerably slipperier.

If your campaign ad needs a time machine, put the date on the screen.

THE CLAIM:

Trump posted a photograph of himself in a military uniform covered with medals.

Bullshit.

The image circulated online with the claim that Trump had posted it himself. Lead Stories checked Trump’s Truth Social activity and found no evidence that the picture came from his account. That distinction matters because Trump really has posted AI images of himself in military settings before, which probably made this one easier to believe.

A politician’s actual social-media feed provides enough material without giving him somebody else’s.

THE CLAIM:

Robert De Niro has apparently come around on Trump and posed with a “TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT” shirt.

Bullshit.

Trump really did share the image Sunday and caption it, “Even this jerk is beginning to get it!” The problem is that De Niro never posed for the picture. The image was AI-generated, turning one of Trump’s most persistent celebrity critics into a fictional supporter for a social-media post.

Apparently political endorsements are now available without the annoying step of getting the endorser involved.

THE CLAIM:

A viral image shows Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posing in tight workout clothes in her kitchen.

Bullshit.

The kitchen is real. The outfit isn’t. Lead Stories traced the image to an August 22 Instagram video in which Ocasio-Cortez was wearing a sleeveless brown dress with white polka dots, then matched details, including the background, her hair, and a bandage on her arm to the manipulated version.

We have now reached the point where even somebody’s pants require independent verification.

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The Backlot Ghost
Hollywood history after somebody turns on the lights and starts opening the closets.

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

Trump says his administration is fighting for American workers. Looking at the record, what should count most when deciding whether a politician is actually on workers’ side: jobs, wages, bargaining rights, workplace protections, or something else?

I’m interested in the answer, including from people who disagree with me.

Work Worth Coming Back For

#OffScript #LaborDay #Workers #Unions #DonaldTrump #LaborRights #FederalWorkers #NLRB #FactCheck #TomHicksMedia

EDITORIAL NOTE

Everything in this story that sounds like somebody got carried away writing a political satire comes from a 44-page report released September 3 by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General. Investigators interviewed 53 current and former Labor Department employees and one employee from another federal agency, then reviewed more than 500 documents, images, and videos. The inspector general said its findings were based on a preponderance of the evidence, meaning investigators concluded the substantiated conduct was more likely than not to have occurred. (Office of Inspector General)

Former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer was never interviewed for the investigation. Her interview was scheduled for April 21, 2026, but she resigned April 20, and her attorney later declined to make her available. The inspector general ultimately concluded that her conduct was inconsistent with applicable standards across six separate areas. (Office of Inspector General)

HAPPY LABOR DAY

There are plenty of ways to celebrate Labor Day. Cook something outside, sleep late, or spend twenty minutes wondering why mattress companies apparently consider this the Super Bowl. Or you could read the federal government’s newly released account of how the woman who ran the Department of Labor treated the people who worked for her.

Thirty-eight witnesses described the Office of the Secretary under Chavez-DeRemer and senior aides as “toxic, intimidating and humiliating.” Employees described public discussions of coworkers’ performance problems, threats of firing, widespread fear about job security and meetings they called “beatdowns.” Some staff also said leadership openly investigated employees suspected of talking to the press and warned that speaking to reporters could cost them their jobs. (Office of Inspector General)

During the 43-day government shutdown in 2025, chief of staff Jihun Han ordered one furloughed employee into the office even though employees had been told not to work or report there. The employee waited nearly an hour, was reprimanded over personal social-media posts made while furloughed, and was told to write an apology asking Chavez-DeRemer for permission to keep the job. The employee kept the position but told investigators the experience was humiliating. (Office of Inspector General)

This office is responsible for advancing the interests of American workers, job seekers, and retirees. It also oversees enforcement involving workplace safety, fair compensation, and employee benefits. That makes the timing of this report just about perfect. (Office of Inspector General)

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SOMEBODY HAD TO HANDLE THE PURSES

The closet might be the cleanest illustration of what went wrong because there isn’t much room for interpretation. Investigators found that Chavez-DeRemer directed her personal aide and executive assistant to use Labor Department motor-pool transportation during the workday to go to her private residence. Their assignment was to organize her bedroom closet. (Office of Inspector General)

They hung laundry and dry cleaning, then organized her clothing, shoes, and purses. When the job was finished, the employees sent Chavez-DeRemer a video documenting their work. The inspector general actually included still images from that video in the report, because apparently even federal misconduct now comes with before-and-after footage. (Office of Inspector General)

The errands didn’t stop with the closet. During the government shutdown, Chavez-DeRemer directed a federal employee to retrieve roughly eight personal packages from her residential mailroom. In contrast, other employees were sent to buy picture frames, holiday ornaments, gifts, alcohol, and wine. Another employee was directed to oversee movers at Chavez-DeRemer’s residence and later arrange cleaning services with her house cleaner. (Office of Inspector General)

Federal ethics rules prohibit supervisors from directing subordinates to use official time for personal activities. The inspector general concluded that Chavez-DeRemer repeatedly violated those standards by using employees and government resources for tasks outside their official duties. Those tasks included organizing her belongings, fetching packages, shopping, overseeing movers and dealing with household service providers. (Office of Inspector General)

Apparently “other duties as assigned” finally found its natural predator.

THE AFTERNOON DRINKING CLUB

Investigators also examined allegations that Chavez-DeRemer, Han and deputy chief of staff Rebecca Wright regularly stored and drank alcohol on Labor Department property during working hours. Witnesses said the three drank in Chavez-DeRemer’s study and sometimes pressured employees who declined to participate or ridiculed them for abstaining. Investigators reviewed surveillance and documentary evidence and said they directly observed bottles in spaces used or controlled by the officials. (Office of Inspector General)

Alcohol can be permitted on Labor Department property for appropriate official purposes, but the rules require advance written authorization. The inspector general searched security records covering Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure and found no such approval. The head of the department’s security center also confirmed that no written authorization was on file. (Office of Inspector General)

So the federal agency responsible for workplace standards had senior leadership allegedly running a workplace where employees could be mocked for declining a drink with the boss. That isn’t a complicated ethics puzzle. Most people figured that one out sometime before their first management job.

THEN THERE WAS THE OREGON TRIP

During personal travel to Oregon in April 2025, Chavez-DeRemer requested an off-the-record stop at an establishment that agents discovered upon entering featured partially nude dancers. She then took money from her purse, handed it to an agent, and instructed him to give it to a performer. When the agent resisted and sought guidance from his supervisor, he was told to follow her instructions. (Office of Inspector General)

Chavez-DeRemer then produced more money and directed the agent to drop the bills one at a time onto the partially nude woman. He hesitated again, sought guidance again, and ultimately complied against his wishes. According to the report, the supervising protective agent later told him not to discuss what happened, although the supervisor himself reported the incident the following day. (Office of Inspector General)

The inspector general also concluded that Chavez-DeRemer developed an “inappropriately close and unprofessional relationship” with that supervisory protective agent while he exercised authority over her security detail. The report specifically says investigators did not find enough direct evidence to establish that the relationship was romantic or sexual. That distinction matters because the documented behavior is plenty bad without decorating it with something investigators couldn’t prove. (Office of Inspector General)

APPARENTLY VEGAS NEEDED AN OFFICIAL REASON

Travel became another problem. Eleven witnesses said official engagements were added to itineraries for destinations Chavez-DeRemer and Wright intended to visit for personal reasons so Labor Department funds could cover the travel. Witnesses identified at least 13 trips involving places where Chavez-DeRemer had family or personal residences, along with five trips to Las Vegas. (Office of Inspector General)

One Las Vegas trip began with no Labor Department engagements. After Chavez-DeRemer and Wright received complimentary rodeo tickets from a lobbyist, a previously scheduled Western Caucus speaking appearance assigned to another official was reassigned to Chavez-DeRemer, which investigators said apparently created an official-business justification for the trip. The inspector general concluded that Chavez-DeRemer and Wright improperly combined personal and official travel. (Office of Inspector General)

There were gifts too. Investigators found several that were missing from the department’s gift-tracking system, including rodeo tickets, cowboy hats, a scarf, work boots, baby gifts, and an alligator-hide wallet valued at about $200. Chavez-DeRemer had completed Labor Department ethics training before accepting several of the items. (Office of Inspector General)

When the ethics investigation gets to the alligator-hide wallet, the meeting has officially gone sideways.

THE INTERVIEW THAT NEVER HAPPENED

The inspector general scheduled Chavez-DeRemer’s interview for April 21, 2026. She resigned April 20, and her attorney subsequently declined to make her available. The other officials involved had also left federal service by the time investigators completed the report. (Office of Inspector General)

That timing doesn’t prove why Chavez-DeRemer resigned, and the inspector general explicitly said the departures occurred before the investigation was completed and did not result from the report’s findings. That caveat belongs here because facts don’t become optional merely because the calendar looks terrible. Still, the calendar looks terrible. (Office of Inspector General)

Interview Tuesday.

Resignation Monday.

THE CLOSET IS THE STORY

The salacious version of this story is obvious. There are dancers, alcohol, Vegas, hotel records, and an allegedly inappropriate relationship, which is more than enough material to keep cable television occupied until somebody famous says something stupid on Tuesday.

But the closet is worse because the closet tells you how power worked on an ordinary day.

So do the packages, the shopping trips and the house cleaner. So does the furloughed employee summoned into the office and made to ask permission to keep a job. So do the 38 witnesses who independently described the workplace as toxic, intimidating and humiliating. (Office of Inspector General)

This wasn’t some random company with a terrible boss and an HR department hiding under the conference table. It was the Department of Labor, whose own inspector general says its top official repeatedly used subordinate employees for personal tasks while overseeing an office where workers described fear, humiliation, and intimidation. The irony is almost too neat. (Office of Inspector General)

You don’t need a Republican explanation or a Democratic explanation for that. You don’t need a red hat, a blue hat, or six people yelling at one another on television. Your boss shouldn’t send you home to organize her purses while you’re being paid by the taxpayer.

Especially when your boss is the Secretary of Labor.

Especially on Labor Day.

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

Four claims making the rounds. Four trips through the machine.

THE CLAIM:

House Speaker Mike Johnson punished Rep. Jasmine Crockett by moving her congressional office into a windowless filing room in the basement of the Rayburn Building.

Bullshit.

Why: It never happened. The story originated with a satire network whose own material carries disclaimers saying it isn’t real, and no credible news organization reported that Johnson moved Crockett’s office. Somewhere between the satire page and everybody’s Facebook feed, the joke lost its warning label and became “news.” (Lead Stories)

THE CLAIM:

A disturbing video circulating online shows children and a pregnant woman locked in cages in footage released from the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Bullshit.

Why: The footage came from a horror production posted to YouTube in 2025, not the Epstein files. The Justice Department’s Epstein Library uses identifiable file numbers, and the video isn’t associated with any of them. The original horror video eventually includes a giant humanoid rat on a hamster wheel, which probably should have been a clue. (Lead Stories)

THE CLAIM:

The suspect in the September 2 Minneapolis mass shooting was a transgender woman named Samantha Hyde.

Bullshit.

Why: Minnesota authorities identified the suspected shooter as 35-year-old Carlton Neal Johnson II. The circulating “Samantha Hyde” image showed signs of digital alteration and was another variation on the long-running Sam Hyde hoax that gets recycled after major shootings. Turning a real shooting into instant culture-war fan fiction apparently remains one of the internet’s most durable hobbies. (Lead Stories)

THE CLAIM:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism, it’s the other way round.”

Bullshit.

Why: There’s no evidence Ocasio-Cortez ever said it. Searches of credible reporting found no record of the quote coming from her, and versions of the line existed long before she entered Congress. It’s an old joke with a new name pasted underneath it, which is apparently all a quotation needs on social media. (Lead Stories)

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

What’s the most ridiculous thing a boss has ever asked you to do that had absolutely nothing to do with your job?

I have a feeling the comments on this one could become their own article.

ONE LAST THING

Workers don’t need a federal holiday to tell them their labor matters. They need managers who remember it the other 364 days of the year. Judging from this report, somebody at the Department of Labor could have used the reminder.

#LaborDay #DepartmentOfLabor #LoriChavezDeRemer #TrumpAdministration #GovernmentEthics #WorkersRights #BullshitDetector #OffScript #TomHicksMedia

The Data Was Already There

This would be a very different story if the federal government had simply decided it didn’t want to ask certain questions anymore. Governments change surveys constantly, and reasonable people can argue about what information belongs on them. That isn’t what happened here.

The Department of Education quietly released data this week from its 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection, one of the most comprehensive examinations of what happens inside American public schools. The survey covers virtually every public school in the country and includes information involving nonbinary students along with allegations of bullying or harassment based on gender identity.

When the new dataset appeared, Associated Press reporters found that columns involving gender identity had been replaced with the notation “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.” The administration also suppressed information showing allegations of gender-identity harassment, district policies addressing that harassment, and links to those policies. Roughly 1,800 of more than 13,000 school districts had reported information concerning transgender and nonbinary students.

That sequence matters because the schools collected the information, gave it to the federal government, and the federal government still has it. This isn’t a case where nobody thought to ask the question or where the information disappeared because a survey ended. The government possesses the answers and decided the public version would not contain them.

The Executive Order Did Exactly What It Said

There’s no need to hunt around for a secret memo explaining why this happened. Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order declared that federal policy would recognize two sexes, male and female, and ordered agencies to remove statements, policies, forms, and communications that the administration considers to promote “gender ideology.” It also instructed federal forms requesting sex to list male or female and not request gender identity.

You can agree with that policy or hate it, and that argument can occupy its own room. The question here is what happens when a political policy reaches backward into information the government has already collected and determines that Americans will no longer see part of the record. That’s a transparency question before it becomes anything else.

We aren’t debating whether the government should ask a question next year. We’re talking about an answer already sitting in a federal database being removed from the version made available to the public. That is a different kind of decision, and it deserves a closer look.

And They Barely Mentioned It

You might expect the release of one of the federal government’s largest school civil-rights datasets to come with an announcement explaining what was in it. According to AP, there was no formal Education Department announcement, even though the previous collection had been accompanied by a detailed report examining trends in educational opportunity. This time the new data appeared quietly while the department’s website was still directing readers toward the previous collection.

The department says the Office for Civil Rights is being realigned with its statutory mission and that additional data will be released. That explanation belongs in the story because it is the administration’s stated position. It still doesn’t change the fact that information already collected from schools was suppressed in the public release.

First, Let’s Kill One Exaggeration Before It Starts

This subject is practically begging for somebody to turn a legitimate story into a bullshit statistic, so we might as well beat them to it. The Williams Institute at UCLA found that 360 federal data collections removed at least one sexual-orientation or gender-identity measure during the first year of Trump’s second administration. Of those, 338 removed gender-identity measures.

A separate Federal Data Terminations Tracker currently contains 375 entries, including 38 entire datasets terminated and 337 instances in which data elements were removed from continuing products. Those numbers are real, but the projects measure different things and overlap in places. One specifically examines sexual-orientation and gender-identity measures while the other tracks a much broader universe of federal information products.

So no, you don’t add 360 and 375 and announce that the administration eliminated 735 federal datasets. Enough is happening here without inflating the count and handing critics an easy reason to dismiss the entire story. The real numbers are already strong enough.

KEEP READING THE BLIND SPOT

One school survey would be a troubling argument over government transparency. Thirty-eight terminated federal datasets and hundreds of removed measurements are something much larger, especially when the missing information touches immigration enforcement, disaster risk, workplace discrimination and public health. That’s where this stops being a story about one executive order and becomes a question about how government accountability works when the underlying evidence gets thinner.

Below the paywall, we’re following that missing information across agencies and asking the question that matters most: what happens when the government gets to decide which evidence the public can use to judge it? That question doesn’t belong to one party, one administration, or one culture-war fight. It belongs to anybody who thinks public power should be measurable.

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The White House unveiled an online arcade Thursday featuring five retro-style games built around Donald Trump’s political agenda. There’s a flying eagle, a school-lunch game, and something called Trump Savings Tycoon.

Then there’s the game where border czar Tom Homan chases migrants for points.

Welcome to the official website of the United States government.

The arcade includes Flappy Bill, Supply Line, Trump Savings Tycoon, Build the Wall, and Rio Run. The first three turn legislation, children’s savings accounts, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s food crusade into harmless-looking distractions. The other two turn immigration enforcement into entertainment. The White House | Associated Press

The Government Built the Punchline

Build the Wall is a knockoff of Tetris. Players stack sections of border wall while keeping people from crossing into the United States.

The White House description tells players to “protect the border from the coming horde.” Once the game begins, the screen calls it a “ZOMBIE BORDER SIEGE.” Migrants have been converted into the walking dead so players can keep them outside the wall. The White House

Rio Run borrows its mechanics from Snake. A digital version of Tom Homan races around the Rio Grande chasing figures with different skin colors. The people he catches join a growing line behind him while a counter marked DEPORTED keeps score. The White House | Agence France-Presse

That’s some sick shit.

These aren’t campaign games tucked away on a MAGA fundraising site. They’re hosted on the official White House website, alongside presidential actions, government announcements, administration biographies, and public information.

The presidential seal is right there.

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The Word They Chose

The word horde matters.

A horde has no names, families, histories, or legal rights. A horde doesn’t contain asylum seekers, longtime residents, farmworkers, parents, children, veterans, neighbors, or people who have never been charged with a violent crime.

A horde is something that swarms. Something that must be repelled.

Then the game goes one step further and calls the migrants zombies. Once the government has reduced people to monsters, the player doesn’t have to wonder what happens to them after Tom Homan catches them. Their lives end at the edge of the screen. The scoreboard moves, the music keeps playing, and another disposable brown figure appears.

That’s the point of dehumanizing language. It clears away empathy before the cruelty begins.

Fun and Winning

The White House promoted the arcade with a video that transformed the familiar Sega logo into MAGA and declared: “CAN’T STOP WINNING. Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account.”

Asked about the backlash, the administration said the arcade was part of an effort to tell the story of Trump’s accomplishments in a way that “resonates with every American.” It called the games a contrast between its “culture of fun and winning” and the Democrats’ “dark socialist vision.” Agence France-Presse

That defense is more revealing than the games.

The administration considers deportation fun. It considers a rising DEPORTED score winning. The trouble isn’t that critics misunderstood the joke. The trouble is that we understood it perfectly.

The people who designed these games knew what the words meant. Someone drew the migrant characters. Someone added the different skin colors. Someone programmed Homan to collect them. Someone created the deportation counter, wrote “coming horde,” added “ZOMBIE BORDER SIEGE,” tested the games, published them, and approved the promotional campaign.

This wasn’t an accidental social-media post somebody forgot to watch until the end.

The Pixels Hide the Bodies

The White House wants the player looking at pixels because pixels don’t scream, bleed, get sick, or ask where their children were taken.

Real immigration detention does all of those things.

By June, at least 50 people had died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since Trump began his second term. A Reuters analysis found that the death rate in ICE detention had more than doubled. Human Rights Watch reported that 39 people died during the first year of the second Trump administration, the highest annual total since ICE was created in 2003. Reuters | Human Rights Watch

Those deaths don’t appear in Rio Run.

Neither do the people sent to countries they have never called home. Neither do the families trying to locate someone swept up during a raid. Neither do the detainees waiting for medical treatment inside an overcrowded facility.

The arcade strips away every consequence and leaves only the chase.

Catch another one. Increase the score. Keep winning.

This Didn’t Begin With an Arcade

In February, Trump’s Truth Social account shared a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House initially dismissed the condemnation as “fake outrage,” removed the video after bipartisan criticism, blamed a staff member, and said it had been posted in error.

Trump refused to apologize.

“I didn’t make a mistake,” he said. Associated Press | Reuters

Now the administration has published a game filled with nonwhite migrants who are chased, captured, and counted. The people at the border have become another version of the Obamas in the jungle video. They’re no longer individuals. They’re racial caricatures placed on a screen for an audience that already knows who it is supposed to hate.

The first defense is always that it’s funny. The second is that the audience is too sensitive. The third is that Democrats are worse.

The actual content is never defended because it can’t be.

What the Seal Means

I served in the United States Air Force. Nobody had to explain that federal government symbols carry weight. When the United States puts its name and seal on something, it tells the world that this speaks for the country.

The White House has put that authority behind a game that calls migrants a horde, depicts them as zombies, and rewards players for deporting them.

This isn’t a comedian testing a bad joke in a nightclub. It isn’t some anonymous troll firing off garbage from a basement. The Executive Office of the President placed it on a government website and invited Americans to play.

So spare me the lecture about political correctness.

You can support border enforcement without celebrating suffering. You can argue for deportation without turning the people being deported into monsters. You can defend immigration laws without programming a cartoon Tom Homan to hunt brown people for points.

The decision to cross those lines was deliberate.

The Cruelty Is the Message

Trump’s White House has learned that outrage works for it. Every offensive post forces the country into the same argument. Critics condemn it. Supporters laugh. Cable television fills another day debating whether everyone has become too sensitive.

While that argument continues, the dehumanizing premise quietly settles in.

Migrants are a horde.

Migrants are zombies.

Migrants are points on a scoreboard.

Once people accept the language, the policy becomes easier to sell. Raids become content. Deportation flights become victory reels. Detention deaths become unfortunate footnotes. The government doesn’t have to persuade the public that every action is humane. It only has to convince enough people that the targets are less human.

The White House says it has created a culture of fun and winning.

Fine.

We now know who has to lose before anyone in that building can have fun.

From Off Script: The Bullshit Detector

Four fresh claims that wandered into traffic without adult supervision.

The United States isn’t at war with Iran

The claim: Vice President JD Vance said he “wouldn’t call it a war” because there was no active shooting at that particular moment.

Bullshit.

Why: The United States had completed another round of strikes against Iran two days earlier. Iran fired at Kuwait on Thursday in retaliation; American service members have been killed, and the fighting has continued for six months. A pause between explosions doesn’t magically turn a war into an awkward misunderstanding. Associated Press

“No tax on tips” saved Nevada workers an average of $10,000

The claim: Donald Trump said 440,000 tipped workers in Nevada saved an average of $10,000 on their taxes because of his policy.

Bullshit.

Why: Trump appears to have confused the amount deducted from taxable income with the amount saved in taxes. A worker in the 12% bracket receiving a $10,000 deduction would save roughly $1,200, and Social Security and Medicare taxes still apply to tipped income. The White House couldn’t produce the government data Trump claimed supported his numbers. FactCheck.org

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. caused obesity to fall 3% in one year

The claim: Kennedy said obesity dropped roughly 3% during the past year and credited the administration’s campaign for healthier food.

Bullshit.

Why: Gallup’s numbers show a 3.5-percentage-point decline spread across 2022 through the first half of 2026. About two-thirds of that decline occurred before Trump returned to office. Researchers also found little evidence that Americans suddenly transformed their diets, while increased use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs offers one possible explanation Kennedy doesn’t seem anxious to advertise. FactCheck.org

Xylitol in gum has been proven to cause heart attacks

The claim: Frightening headlines say the common sugar substitute found in gum, toothpaste, and low-sugar foods causes heart attacks and strokes.

Bullshit.

Why: The certainty is manufactured. The newest research hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and earlier studies connected cardiovascular risk with naturally elevated xylitol in the bloodstream, not ordinary consumption of xylitol-containing food. More study is warranted, especially for people already vulnerable to blood clots, but nobody has proved that chewing sugar-free gum is a shortcut to the cardiac ward. PolitiFact

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If this article gave you something worth passing along, share it with someone who still thinks this is harmless political theater. The government has already provided the scoreboard.

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EDITORIAL NOTE

Christian Castro has not been convicted of any crime. The account of the shooting described below comes from state charging documents, court records, video evidence cited by investigators and reporting from ProPublica, Reuters and the Associated Press. The Justice Department says its civil-rights investigation remains open, despite an email from the prosecutor handling the case saying officials in Washington stopped him from bringing that charge.

On paper, the Justice Department did something extraordinary this week. It indicted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on six federal counts connected to his conduct during Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

Look a little closer and the celebration gets stuck in your throat.

ICE agent Christian Castro allegedly shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis through the closed door of an occupied house. Castro then claimed Sosa-Celis and another man had attacked federal agents with a snow shovel and broom. Video evidence reportedly contradicted that account so completely that prosecutors dropped the assault charges they had filed against the two men.

The federal government charged Castro for what he allegedly said afterward. It did not charge him for the bullet he allegedly fired.

Then it fired the prosecutor who wanted to.

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A bullet through the door

The confrontation began on January 14, during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of immigration agents into Minnesota. Castro and another agent chased a Venezuelan immigrant named Alfredo Aljorna after a traffic stop. Aljorna reached the house he shared with Sosa-Celis, and the two men got inside.

According to Minnesota charging documents, Castro fired through the closed door while knowing the house was occupied. The bullet struck Sosa-Celis in the leg. A witness said two children were inside at the time.

Federal agents followed the gunfire with tear gas. They entered the home and arrested the men and their partners. By the following day, the Department of Homeland Security had already supplied the country with its preferred version of events.

DHS described Sosa-Celis and Aljorna as violent criminals who had ambushed the agents and beaten them with a shovel or broomstick. Federal prosecutors charged the two men with assaulting officers.

Then investigators saw the video.

The charges against both men were dropped. ICE acknowledged that the sworn accounts provided by its agents appeared to be false. That’s a fairly important development when those accounts had been used to turn the people inside the house into criminals and the man who fired through their door into the victim. ProPublica

The charge that disappeared

Minnesota prosecutors charged Castro with multiple felonies, including assault with a dangerous weapon, along with falsely reporting a crime. He was arrested in Texas and held for 90 days while Minnesota sought his extradition.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refused to sign the extradition papers.

Castro was released last week with an active Minnesota warrant still waiting for him. Minnesota officials had warned that he might flee to Mexico, citing a jailhouse conversation in which Castro reportedly discussed marrying a woman and buying a house there. DHS dismissed Minnesota’s prosecution as a political stunt and claimed federal agents were protected from state prosecution by absolute immunity, a position Reuters reports is legally incorrect. Reuters

Meanwhile, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans was pursuing the federal case. According to ProPublica, Evans intended to charge Castro with deprivation of rights under color of law, a serious civil-rights offense similar to the federal charges brought against the Minneapolis police officers involved in George Floyd’s murder.

Evans was overruled.

In an email to attorneys representing Sosa-Celis and other people involved in the case, Evans said the decision came from Justice Department leadership in Washington and the U.S. attorney’s office. “I objected in the strongest possible terms,” he wrote. “It wasn’t enough.”

The government would pursue false-statement charges instead.

That distinction matters. False statements make the alleged lie the crime. A civil-rights charge would force the government to confront the reason for the lie: an armed federal agent allegedly fired through the door of an occupied home without lawful justification and wounded the man on the other side.

Castro has now been indicted on six counts of making false statements. The charges reportedly will be unsealed when he is taken into federal custody.

Evans was fired Thursday after his email became public. According to Reuters and the Associated Press, he is now under investigation for allegedly obstructing the grand jury investigation. The Justice Department maintains that no final decision has been made about civil-rights charges and that its investigation continues. Reuters | Associated Press

That leaves us with quite an arrangement. The agent accused of shooting a man received the narrower federal charge. The governor of Texas kept him from facing Minnesota’s assault case. The prosecutor who told the victims’ attorneys how the serious federal charge disappeared lost his job and landed under investigation himself.

The machinery worked. Just in the wrong direction.

The accountability switcheroo

False statements to federal investigators are crimes. Six counts aren’t a congratulatory fruit basket, and Castro could face real punishment if convicted.

But the alleged lies didn’t materialize during an idle conversation around the office coffee machine. Prosecutors say they were used to justify a shooting and accuse the wounded man of attacking the person who shot him. Charging only the lie separates the cover story from the conduct it was allegedly designed to conceal.

That’s useful if your goal is to claim accountability without asking the question that makes everyone uncomfortable.

Why did an ICE agent fire into that house?

The Trump administration has spent much of its second term treating immigration officers as an occupying force answerable primarily to the people who deployed them. Federal officials have repeatedly blamed the people shot by immigration agents before independent investigations could begin. In another Minneapolis shooting, Justice Department officials reportedly refused to cooperate with state investigators reviewing the death of Renee Good.

This case briefly looked different. A federal prosecutor was preparing a civil-rights charge. Then Washington intervened, the charge shrank and the prosecutor’s career ended.

I spent enough years working around legal files to know that charging decisions are rarely simple. Evidence matters. Prosecutors disagree. Cases that look obvious from the outside can fall apart when someone has to prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt.

That doesn’t explain this.

When the prosecutor handling the case puts in writing that Justice Department leadership stopped him, then gets fired after the public learns about it, people don’t need a law degree to smell smoke. Investigating him for obstruction might eventually prove justified. Right now, it looks a hell of a lot like the Justice Department found the whistle louder than the gunshot.

Who is being protected?

The Justice Department says the civil-rights investigation remains open. Fine. Then it should explain why the prosecutor believed the charge had been stopped, who overruled him, what evidence supposedly required the lighter approach and why he was fired immediately after his warning became public.

“Trust the process” doesn’t work when the process is busy investigating the person who exposed it.

Castro deserves the presumption of innocence. Sosa-Celis deserved the presumption that he wasn’t a violent criminal before DHS smeared him to defend the agent who shot him. Evans deserves something more persuasive than an anonymously reported obstruction investigation appearing the moment his email embarrassed Main Justice.

And the public deserves to know whether federal law still applies to the people wearing federal badges.

The danger reaches far beyond this shooting. Armed government agents need room to make difficult decisions in dangerous situations. Giving them automatic innocence, protecting them from state prosecution and disciplining prosecutors who push for accountability creates something else entirely.

It creates permission.

The bullet went through a door. The protection came from Washington.

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

“No Americans have been killed in the Iran war.”

The claim: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said no Americans had died in the six-month war with Iran.

Bullshit.

Why: The Pentagon has reported 18 American service members killed. Lutnick later admitted he misspoke and said he had confused the Iran war with the operation in Venezuela. Misplacing 18 dead Americans while selling a war as an “economic choke-out” is one hell of a clerical error. The Guardian

“The administration brought $19 trillion in new investment.”

The claim: Vice President JD Vance said the Trump administration has attracted $19 trillion in new investment.

Bullshit.

Why: The White House’s own website listed $11 trillion in investment announcements, which isn’t the same as money invested. That total includes vague promises, trade commitments and figures that don’t qualify as investments at all. Federal data put new foreign direct investment during 2025 at roughly $232 billion. Apparently the remaining $18.768 trillion is still looking for parking. CNN fact-check via KTVZ

“Canada doesn’t allow American banks.”

The claim: Trump said the United States has no banks operating in Canada because Canada won’t permit them.

Bullshit.

Why: Fifteen U.S.-based banks currently operate in Canada, including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Capital One and Wells Fargo. Trump also referred to the Bank of Canada as one of Canada’s commercial banks. It’s the country’s central bank, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Reserve. Geography apparently wasn’t the only thing missing from the briefing book. Associated Press

“America has virtually unlimited munitions.”

The claim: Trump said the United States has “virtually unlimited” amounts of mid- and high-grade ammunition, dismissing reports that the Iran war has badly depleted American stockpiles.

Bullshit.

Why: Reuters reported that the Army has burned through much of its supply of highly accurate long-range missiles, including virtually all of its ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles. The administration is now keeping new munitions for the United States and temporarily holding back sales to allies while manufacturers try to rebuild the arsenal. “Virtually unlimited” is a strange way to describe weapons you’ve nearly run out of and can’t replace fast enough. Reuters | Reuters update

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

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Congress already took a meat cleaver to Medicaid. The Republican tax and spending law enacted last year is expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over ten years and leave about 7.5 million more people uninsured because of its Medicaid provisions. Republicans congratulated themselves, called it reform, and assured everyone that deserving Americans would remain protected. (KFF)

Now the Trump administration is back for another pass.

Hospitals are warning that the regulations being written to implement the law could hurt them even more than the cuts Congress approved. That sounds like something cooked up by an expensive lobbying firm until you read the government’s own estimates. CMS says one proposed payment rule would reduce federal Medicaid spending by $510.1 billion from 2026 through 2035. The same proposal puts the combined federal and state reduction at $774.8 billion. (Politico, Federal Register)

Those figures don’t describe money saved by negotiating cheaper surgical gloves or replacing a few administrators with a competent spreadsheet. They describe money that would otherwise flow through state Medicaid programs to hospitals, nursing facilities, academic medical centers, behavioral health providers, and other people who deliver actual care. (CMS, KFF)

THE PAYMENT SYSTEM NOBODY EXPLAINS

The fight centers partly on something called state-directed payments. Most Medicaid patients receive care through private managed-care companies, but states can instruct those companies to pay certain providers more for specific services. The payments help compensate hospitals and other providers because ordinary Medicaid rates often fall below the cost of delivering care. (KFF, MACPAC)

States frequently finance their share through taxes on hospitals, insurers, or other health-care providers. That money allows the state to claim matching federal Medicaid dollars, which then return to the health-care system through higher payments. Yes, the arrangement can look like Washington and the states built a Rube Goldberg machine out of tax forms, reimbursement formulas, and several warehouses of accounting bullshit. (KFF, Federal Register)

There are legitimate reasons to inspect it. The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission found that annual state-directed payments grew from $69.3 billion to $110.2 billion between February 2023 and August 2024, an increase of nearly 60 percent. Public information about where every dollar goes remains incomplete, and researchers haven’t always been able to determine whether the payments produced measurable improvements in access or quality. (MACPAC, KFF)

Better oversight isn’t what CMS has proposed.

Congress capped state-directed payments for four categories of care, including inpatient and outpatient hospital services. The administration’s proposed rule would eventually extend those limits to every service covered by state-directed payments and certain targeted fee-for-service payments. It would also eliminate one of the main methods states currently use to distribute supplemental payments. CMS’s own summary says plainly that the rule reaches beyond the services Congress named.(CMS, Federal Register)

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THE $510 BILLION QUESTION

The Congressional Budget Office originally estimated that the state-directed-payment provisions passed by Congress would reduce federal Medicaid spending by $149 billion through 2034. CMS now projects a $510.1 billion reduction through 2035 under the law and its proposed rule. That’s more than three times the original estimate, although the difference isn’t entirely caused by the administration broadening the restrictions. (KFF, Federal Register)

CMS used newer information that included payment programs unavailable to CBO when it prepared its estimate. CMS also counted an additional year, 2035, when the annual reduction alone is projected to exceed $80 billion. KFF says CMS didn’t separately calculate the cost of every policy choice it added, leaving no reliable way to determine exactly how much of the difference comes from better data and how much comes from the administration stretching the law. (KFF)

That distinction matters because screaming that Trump secretly added exactly $361 billion in cuts would be dishonest. The honest version is damning enough. Congress named four service areas, CMS expanded the restriction to all of them, and the agency hasn’t disclosed how much its expansion contributes to the overall reduction. (CMS, KFF)

Then there’s the second regulation.

The Republican law also restricts the provider taxes states use to finance their share of Medicaid. CMS’s proposed provider-tax rule estimates a $245.8 billion reduction in federal Medicaid spending and another $138.2 billion reduction in state spending over ten years. The agency expects hospitals to suffer the largest payment losses because hospital taxes produce most provider-tax revenue. (Federal Register, CMS)

The two estimates can’t simply be added together because the policies interact. A state losing provider-tax revenue may already be forced to reduce the same payments affected by the other rule. The precise combined damage remains uncertain, but nobody can pretend these are a couple of harmless accounting adjustments.(Federal Register, KFF)

“THE STATES CAN FIND THE MONEY”

CMS assumes states will replace about 30 percent of their lost provider-tax funding with general revenue. That leaves roughly 70 percent unreplaced in the agency’s own projection. Somehow, the same regulation certifies that the rule won’t significantly affect a substantial number of small rural hospitals because states remain free to find money elsewhere. (Federal Register)

That’s one hell of an escape clause.

States can raise taxes, raid education and transportation budgets, reduce Medicaid benefits, cut provider payments, or tell Washington they found the couch cushions empty. Most states must balance their budgets, and Medicaid is already one of their largest expenses. Saying states are free to replace vanished federal money is like taking someone’s paycheck and reminding him that bank robbery remains an available source of income. (KFF)

KFF estimates that at least 37 states have hospital payment arrangements that exceed the new limits. About $60 billion in current annual federal spending on hospital services sits above those limits and could eventually disappear. More than half of the potential reduction falls on eight states: California, Illinois, Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arizona, and Michigan. (KFF)

Red and blue won’t mean much when the closest maternity ward is an hour farther away.

HOSPITALS AREN’T THE HEROES

Hospital corporations have earned plenty of suspicion. Americans routinely receive bills that appear to have been calculated by a loan shark with access to medical coding software. Some large systems are highly profitable, executives receive absurd compensation, and consolidation has given hospitals enormous power to demand higher prices from private insurers.

That doesn’t make every payment cut painless. Medicaid accounted for 19 percent of all hospital spending in 2023 and covered roughly 41 percent of American births. In rural areas, Medicaid financed nearly half of all births. (KFF)

Hospitals don’t create separate emergency rooms, maternity wards, cancer centers, and nursing staff for each insurance program. When revenue falls, the institution cuts whatever it believes it can survive without. The maternity unit closes for everyone, the specialist leaves town, and the remaining emergency department gets busier for every patient who walks through its doors. (KFF, KFF)

I’ve spent enough time inside hospitals as a cancer patient to know how quickly all the political language disappears once somebody says the word cancer. At that moment, you don’t give a damn which reimbursement formula paid for the nurse, the operating room, or the machine keeping track of your vital signs. You care that the people and equipment are there when you need them. Washington can call the missing money “efficiency” all day, but the patient staring at a longer drive or a closed department will know what it really was.

THE SALES PITCH

The Trump administration says these payment systems have become excessive and reward providers instead of patients. CMS argues that tying Medicaid payments more closely to Medicare will restrain federal spending and stop states from using financing maneuvers to draw down larger federal matches. That argument deserves to be taken seriously because an opaque payment system growing by tens of billions a year shouldn’t receive a lifetime exemption from scrutiny. (CMS, MACPAC)

The administration goes further. An HHS economic report projects that reducing provider taxes and state-directed payments could lower prices paid outside Medicaid by as much as 3.5 percent. The theory is that hospitals will face lower provider taxes and shift fewer costs onto privately insured patients. (HHS)

“Could” is carrying that promise home on its back.

Hospitals could respond by lowering commercial prices. They could also eliminate services, cancel construction, reduce staffing, close clinics, or demand higher payments wherever they retain enough market power to get them. The government has produced a model of the reaction it wants, while hospitals are warning about the reaction they’re already preparing to make. (Politico, KFF)

PATIENTS ALWAYS ARRIVE LAST

The administration’s press release calls the $510 billion reduction “savings.” Hospitals call it lost revenue. States call it a budget hole. (CMS, KFF)

Patients will call it Tuesday.

They’ll discover the effect when a doctor stops accepting Medicaid, a nursing facility develops a waiting list, or a rural hospital quietly announces that babies will have to be delivered somewhere else. The uninsured will still show up in emergency rooms because illness doesn’t read congressional budget resolutions. Their care will become more expensive, more delayed, and more likely to be absorbed by the same hospitals Washington just squeezed. (KFF, KFF)

Republicans already passed the largest Medicaid reduction in the program’s history. Now the administration is writing regulations that extend the squeeze beyond the services Congress specifically named. The details are buried deeply enough that most voters won’t notice until the cuts have a street address. (KFF, CMS)

That was probably the idea.

THE RECORD

• The 2025 Republican tax and spending law is expected to reduce federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over ten years. (KFF)

• CMS estimates its proposed state-directed-payment rule will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $510.1 billion and combined federal and state spending by $774.8 billion from 2026 through 2035. (Federal Register)

• CMS estimates its proposed provider-tax rule will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $245.8 billion and state spending by $138.2 billion over the same period. (Federal Register)

• KFF estimates that 84 percent of current federal state-directed-payment spending goes to hospital services. (KFF)

• At least 37 states have hospital payment arrangements expected to exceed the new federal limits. (KFF)

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

The day’s biggest story rarely travels alone. Here are four fresh pieces of bullshit currently trying to sneak past the velvet rope.

The expanded Bullshit Detector Guide is $4.95 at the Tom Hicks Media Store, and remains free for paid subscribers.

BLAME THE IMMIGRANTS FOR MEASLES

The claim: Florida Republican Byron Donalds says “rampant illegal immigration” under President Biden caused recent measles outbreaks.

Bullshit.

Why: Researchers found no immigration connection to the country’s largest outbreaks. Most cases resulted from domestic transmission in communities with falling vaccination rates, and 94 percent of confirmed 2026 cases involved people who were unvaccinated or had unknown status. When a politician answers a vaccination question by blaming immigrants, he’s changing the subject because the real answer might upset his voters. (FactCheck.org)

SHERROD BROWN CAUSED A DEADLY CRASH

The claim: A Republican Senate campaign ad says an Ohio crash that killed a family happened because Sherrod Brown “opened our borders to dangerous illegals.”

Bullshit.

Why: The accused driver was a naturalized American citizen, and federal officials haven’t established when he entered the country. Investigators found no connection between Brown’s votes and the crash, while the victims’ family objected to their photographs being used in the ad. Turning a dead family into unsupported campaign copy is especially rancid work. (PolitiFact)

TRUMP ALONE DROPPED DRUG PRICES

The claim: Trump says his policies produced the largest prescription-drug price reductions in American history.

Bullshit.

Why: Prescription prices did fall 3.1 percent over the past year, but experts point to several causes, including generic competition, falling GLP-1 prices, and Medicare negotiations authorized under President Biden. TrumpRx may help some cash-paying customers, although its claimed $700 million in savings represents less than 0.2 percent of annual national prescription spending. A real price decline doesn’t give one politician sole custody of the credit. (FactCheck.org)

GROWTH WILL TAKE CARE OF THE DEBT

The claim: Trump says economic growth will “very easily” handle America’s rising debt.

Bullshit.

Why: The national debt has crossed $40 trillion, federal spending has increased, and Trump’s second-term tax and immigration law is projected to add $4.7 trillion to the debt. His first-term tax changes added trillions more. Both parties helped build this mess, but claiming historic economic growth will magically erase it is a campaign slogan wearing an accountant’s visor. (Reuters)

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Editorial Note

In 1999, Trey Parker and Matt Stone released an obscene little musical about Americans manufacturing a crisis, blaming Canada, and marching toward war. It was satire so ridiculous that nobody could mistake it for reality. Apparently, reality took that personally.

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In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny sneak into Asses of Fire, a filthy Canadian movie starring Terrance and Phillip, and begin repeating the language. Their parents could examine their own parenting, but that sounds exhausting. Instead, they organize Mothers Against Canada, arrest the Canadian comedians responsible, and help push the United States into war with its friendliest neighbor.

The whole thing is powered by a wonderfully simple political formula. Find an embarrassing problem. Blame somebody else. Turn the blame into a movement, and keep escalating until backing down would require admitting that you were full of shit from the beginning.

The movie’s signature song, “Blame Canada,” was funny because Canada was the most harmless villain Trey Parker and Matt Stone could have chosen. It was even nominated for an Academy Award. Twenty-seven years later, the United States government has decided the joke needed tariffs and an executive order.

Blame Canada, but Make It Government Policy

U.S.-Canada trade talks collapsed on August 21. The Trump administration followed with 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods, while Canada announced retaliatory tariffs ranging from 15 to 50 percent on nearly $20 billion in American products. The Canadian response is scheduled to take effect September 8, which gives everyone a few more days to pretend this is somebody else’s problem. Associated Press

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the American demands would have reduced important Canadian industries to subsidiaries of U.S. companies or gradually wiped them out. He said Washington also wanted limits placed on Canada’s future trade agreements and sought concessions affecting its French-language and cultural protections. Canada rejected the terms because sovereign nations generally dislike being handed surrender papers disguised as trade deals. Associated Press

Trump responded with the diplomatic sophistication of Cartman losing access to Cheesy Poofs. He returned to his threats of making Canada the 51st state, told Canadian leaders to “fall in line,” and signed an order renaming the American federal government’s Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Sheila Broflovski at least waited until the children started swearing before launching Mothers Against Canada. Trump has managed the same campaign without Terrance and Phillip releasing a sequel.

The order can’t control what Canada or international organizations call the lake. Still, it did provide the president of the United States another opportunity to autograph a piece of paper and annoy an ally. Only 14 percent of Americans support the new name, which means the policy has united the country around one clear principle: Lake Ontario was doing just fine. Reuters

Carney finally told the administration to “stop doing memes, stop throwing shade and stop trying to be tough.” That would be an embarrassing thing for one national leader to have to tell another under any circumstances. It becomes considerably worse when the adult receiving the lecture is the American president. Associated Press

The Joke Works Because the Grift Works

The movie understood something about American politics that has aged beautifully and horribly. A manufactured enemy offers politicians an escape from responsibility. They never have to solve the problem because keeping voters angry at the villain is the whole damn point.

Canada didn’t create America’s cost-of-living problems. Canada didn’t design Trump’s tariff program, start his war with Iran, or force him to spend political capital renaming part of a lake. Canada simply became available when the administration needed somebody new to blame.

That’s how the gag works in South Park. Kyle’s mother refuses to consider her own decisions, so Terrance, Phillip, and their entire country become responsible for everything. Once the lie gives Mothers Against Canada a sense of purpose, its members defend it long after the consequences become obvious.

Trump is playing the same game with higher stakes. He says the United States doesn’t need Canada while American refineries process roughly four million barrels of Canadian crude every day. Canada also supplies aluminum, potash for American farms, and parts used by an auto industry built across both countries. The two nations exchanged about $872 billion in goods and services last year, but apparently none of that counts when there’s a caps-lock post to write. Associated Press

Trump has even acknowledged that America “desperately needs” Canadian aluminum while imposing a 50 percent tariff on it. There’s your entire trade strategy in one sentence. Take something the country badly needs, make it more expensive, and call the resulting damage leverage.

Americans Get the Bill

Tariffs are taxes collected from the American companies importing the affected goods. Those businesses can absorb some of the cost, cut expenses elsewhere, or pass it along through higher prices. Canada doesn’t receive an invoice from Donald Trump and mail Washington a check with a sad maple leaf drawn on it.

In the movie, Cartman’s V-chip shocks him every time he curses. In our version, American consumers get shocked every time Trump gets angry and announces another tariff. The device isn’t implanted in our skulls. The jolt arrives at the checkout counter.

Canada’s retaliation will hit American steel, dairy products, appliances, farm equipment, seafood, clothing, cosmetics, cheese, and toilet paper. Nothing says “winning a trade war” like paying more to wipe your ass. Associated Press

Most Americans appear to understand the stupidity. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 20 percent supported the new Canadian tariffs, while 57 percent opposed them. The lake-renaming stunt performed even worse, with 14 percent supporting it and 63 percent opposed. Reuters

I miss when this kind of nonsense required a movie ticket and popcorn. In the cartoon version, the children form La Résistance and save the world after the adults finally see what their hysteria has created. Our resistance currently consists of an angry Canadian prime minister, 63 percent of Americans opposing the lake’s new name, and everyone quietly checking the price of toilet paper. It isn’t much, but Kyle and Stan started with less.

The South Park movie wrapped its warning in profanity, fart jokes, and an Oscar-nominated musical number. Washington heard every word and somehow mistook it for a policy proposal.

Who knew the movie was a documentary?

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, apparently.

THE RECORD

The United States imposed 50 percent tariffs on approximately $20 billion in Canadian goods after trade negotiations collapsed. Canada announced retaliatory duties of 15 to 50 percent on nearly $20 billion in American products, beginning September 8. Canada remains America’s second-largest trading partner, sends roughly four million barrels of crude oil south each day, and accounts for nearly 20 percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption. Associated Press

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

Four fresh claims that wandered into traffic without adult supervision.

Iran’s Kharg Island Was Destroyed

The claim: An AI-generated video posted by Trump showed that the United States had destroyed Iran’s vital Kharg Island oil hub.

Bullshit.

Why: A U.S. official confirmed that American forces hadn’t attacked Kharg Island. Vice President JD Vance later said Trump was merely “sending a message,” which is a fascinating euphemism for a president posting fake footage of a military strike during an actual war. The real U.S. strikes targeted launchers on Larak Island. Reuters

Immigrants Caused the Measles Outbreaks

The claim: Byron Donalds blamed America’s measles outbreaks on “rampant illegal immigration” during the Biden administration.

Bullshit.

Why: Infectious-disease experts identified falling vaccination rates as the primary driver. About 94 percent of confirmed 2026 cases involved people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. Investigators found no data connecting the outbreaks to undocumented immigrants, while past tracing has often led back to unvaccinated Americans returning from overseas. PolitiFact

Trump’s Border Policies Caused Maine’s Overdose Decline

The claim: JD Vance said drug overdoses fell in Maine because the Trump administration “sealed the border.”

Bullshit.

Why: Maine’s fatal overdose decline began before Trump returned to office. Deaths dropped from 2022 to 2023, again in 2024, and another 20 percent in 2025. Researchers credit several factors, including wider access to naloxone and treatment, changes in the fentanyl supply, and expanded prevention efforts. Vance arrived after the decline started and tried to climb into the team photo. PolitiFact

That Imported Beef Might Be Horse Meat

The claim: Viral posts warned that beef sold in American supermarkets might secretly come from horses purchased from the federal government and slaughtered overseas.

Bullshit.

Why: The United States doesn’t import horse meat for human consumption, and selling horse meat labeled as beef is illegal. Imported meat is inspected, labeled, and subject to laboratory testing. As of August 25, the USDA had issued no recall involving horse meat masquerading as beef, and investigators found no evidence that the supposed supply chain existed. PolitiFact

Elsewhere Around Tom Hicks Media

Tom’s Number Ones opens another musical time capsule with the songs that ruled six different charts on one day in history.

Lotus Purrspective examines another baffling human practice from the only household authority qualified to judge us.

The Backlot Ghost returns today with another story classic Hollywood tried to leave buried behind the studio gates.

Rabbit Ears Classic TV revisits the programs, performances, and production stories that made television worth remembering.

Panic Room Sports brings smart football coverage with attitude, because reacting first is easy. Checking the tape takes work.

Buy Me a Cup of Tea

Independent publishing runs on research, stubbornness, and an unreasonable amount of tea. If Off Script gave you something worth thinking about, you can help keep the kettle working.

One Question Before You Go

When did America’s treatment of Canada stop looking like negotiation and start looking like political theater?

#OffScript #Canada #DonaldTrump #Tariffs #TradeWar #SouthPark #Politics #TomHicksMedia

EDITORIAL NOTE

Gas prices have become one of Donald Trump’s favorite magic tricks. He points at a number, claims he created it, and moves along before anyone can look under the table. This time, we looked.

If somebody offers you gasoline well below the surrounding market price, there are a few reasonable questions you might ask. Where did it come from? Who absorbed the loss? How long can that price possibly last?

Donald Trump apparently skipped all of those and went directly to taking credit.

THE $3.47 MIRACLE

The Freedom Fuel Network appeared this summer at gas stations around Pennsylvania and New Jersey, wrapped itself in flags, and began selling gasoline for $3.47 a gallon. The number wasn’t subtle. Trump is the 47th president, so the stations turned his place in history into a pump price and waited for him to notice.

He noticed.

Trump called Freedom Fuel a “VERY smart Retailer” and promoted the discount shortly before the Fourth of July weekend. The White House followed with a video of customers holding cash and thanking Trump for lowering their gasoline prices. There was one small problem with that celebration: the Trump administration hadn’t lowered the price and admitted it hadn’t provided the company with any funding. Associated Press via WHYY

That should’ve prompted a fairly obvious question. If the government wasn’t subsidizing the gasoline and nobody else was covering the difference, how was Freedom Fuel selling it for roughly 40 cents below the surrounding market? Trump didn’t ask because Trump had already gotten what he wanted: a flattering number with his name attached to it.

SOMEBODY FORGOT THE $4 MILLION BILL

Mansfield Oil Company may have found the answer. In a federal lawsuit filed August 19, Mansfield alleges that KRSM Inc. and its president, Syed Kazmi, collected approximately 1.12 million gallons of gasoline from a Pennsylvania terminal between May 21 and July 7. The fuel was worth exactly $3,998,868.46, and Mansfield says it hasn’t been paid a dime.

This wasn’t somebody climbing a fence at midnight and driving away with a tanker. KRSM had a commercial credit arrangement that allowed it to collect fuel and pay later. Mansfield says a data problem delayed its invoices, but revised bills were eventually sent and attempts to withdraw payment were rejected by KRSM’s bank.

According to the lawsuit, some of that gasoline was sold to stations participating in the Freedom Fuel Network. Mansfield’s attorneys put the allegation rather plainly: KRSM could generate publicity with such low prices “because it never paid Plaintiff for such fuel.” That’s one hell of a discount program. The Guardian

KRSM disputes the allegations and calls the case an accounting disagreement involving incorrectly priced invoices. A source connected to Freedom Fuel says KRSM and Syed Kazmi aren’t affiliated with the network, although previous reporting connected companies tied to Syed and his brother Shamikh Kazmi to 14 of its original 25 locations. Mansfield’s claims remain allegations, and a federal court will decide whether nearly $4 million was stolen, withheld, or swallowed by one mother of a bookkeeping problem. Associated Press via WHYY

Trump and the White House aren’t accused of participating in any of it. They did something more familiar and considerably dumber. They saw an unsustainable price, assumed it existed because Trump is magnificent, and turned it into presidential propaganda without checking who was eating the loss.

The answer, according to Mansfield, was Mansfield.

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SIXTY-FIVE BILLION BARRELS OF SOMEDAY

Trump has already found his next cheap-gas miracle. He announced what he called the biggest oil deal in history, giving the United States majority participation in 17 Venezuelan oilfields containing approximately 65 billion barrels of recoverable crude. He immediately began selling those underground reserves as future relief for Americans paying more than $4 a gallon.

That sounds wonderful if you pretend an oil reserve is a pile of gasoline cans waiting beside the highway. It isn’t. A reserve is an estimate of oil that may be technically recoverable over many years if the money, machinery, contracts, infrastructure and politics all cooperate.

The proposed agreement is expected to run for at least 25 years and attract roughly $100 billion in investment. The full contract hasn’t been released, the companies operating several fields haven’t been publicly identified, and lawyers are already questioning whether the agreement can survive future legal challenges. Trump is presenting the finish line before everyone else has agreed where to build the track. Reuters

Some mature fields included in the deal are producing oil now, and the United States can gain access to an existing base of exportable crude. That part is real and shouldn’t be dismissed. The giant production increases Trump is promising require repairs around Lake Maracaibo, new development in the Orinoco Belt, and years of work in an industry gutted by neglect, political interference and underinvestment. Reuters

THIS ISN’T EASY OIL

Most Venezuelan crude is heavy or extra-heavy and sour, meaning it’s thick, high in sulfur and packed with contaminants that make it more expensive to transport and refine. Some of it has to be diluted before it can even move through a pipeline. You don’t pour this stuff into the neighborhood refinery and watch regular unleaded come out the other side.

Several large Gulf Coast refineries can process it because they were specifically built with cokers, crackers, and hydrocrackers designed for heavy crude. Valero says Venezuelan oil can supply a substantial share of its heavy-crude needs, while Phillips 66 says it can process approximately 250,000 barrels a day. Before sanctions, Gulf Coast refineries handled as much as 800,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan heavy oil, producing gasoline along with diesel, jet fuel, asphalt and petrochemical products. Reuters on Valero, Reuters on Phillips 66

So yes, Venezuelan oil can become gasoline. It simply requires specialized refineries, more processing and considerably more expense than Trump’s rhetoric suggests. Those facts matter because his sales pitch makes 65 billion barrels of difficult crude sound like 65 billion barrels of finished gasoline scheduled to arrive next Tuesday.

REPLACEMENT ISN’T RELIEF

American refiners were already receiving Venezuelan oil before Trump announced this agreement. Phillips 66 has said additional Venezuelan barrels could replace heavy crude it currently buys from Canada. Replacing one foreign supplier with another may improve refinery margins, but it doesn’t automatically create a massive new supply of gasoline.

There is another bottleneck Trump rarely mentions. The White House says American refineries are operating at nearly 100 percent of existing capacity. Adding more crude to a system already close to its processing limit doesn’t produce a matching increase in finished fuel, no matter how many times the president says “65 billion.” Reuters

Trump now says Venezuelan oil will also refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has fallen to its lowest level since 1982. The reserve stores crude oil, not finished gasoline, and replenishing it removes barrels from immediate commercial use. Analysts say a full refill could take years, assuming the money, infrastructure and political commitment survive that long. Reuters

Could increased Venezuelan production eventually put some downward pressure on crude prices? Certainly. Could access to discounted heavy oil reduce costs for Gulf Coast refiners? Absolutely.

Neither answer puts cheap gasoline in your tank tomorrow morning.

THE SAME TRICK TWICE

Freedom Fuel gave Trump a gasoline price he liked, so he promoted it without asking how it was possible. Mansfield now alleges that part of the answer was nearly $4 million worth of fuel that somebody never paid for. Trump got the video while somebody else got the invoice.

Venezuela gives him an enormous reserve number, so he’s promoting that before the contracts are public, the infrastructure is repaired, or most of the oil is produced. He’s counting barrels that could take decades to recover and claiming the political credit today. Once again, Trump gets the announcement while somebody else gets the bill.

I’ve been around long enough to know presidents don’t personally set the number on the gas-station sign. Markets, wars, refineries, transportation costs, taxes, seasonal blends, and local competition all have a hand in it. Anyone claiming sole credit when prices fall and blaming everybody else when they rise is selling you a children’s version of the oil business.

Trump isn’t lowering gasoline prices through force of personality. He’s finding cheap gasoline wherever it appears, putting his name on the pump and leaving before anyone checks the receipt. Sometimes the fuel hasn’t been paid for, and sometimes it hasn’t been pulled out of the ground.

Either way, he wants his credit up front.

THE RECORD

Freedom Fuel really did sell gasoline for $3.47, and Trump really did promote it as evidence that prices were coming down. Mansfield now alleges that the distributor supplying some participating stations failed to pay nearly $4 million for 1.12 million gallons, while KRSM disputes that account. Venezuela possesses enormous oil reserves, but the newly announced agreement requires massive investment, specialized refining, and years of development before its promised production can fully arrive.

Those facts don’t prove Trump arranged anything improper at Freedom Fuel, and the article doesn’t accuse him of doing so. They prove something more basic about the way he governs. If the number looks good, Trump takes the credit first and asks questions never.

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

The Bullshit Detector checks the stories people are being asked to swallow while everyone’s attention is somewhere else. Today’s batch includes synthetic warfare, deliberately thirstier cars and a president insulting communities that would prefer to keep their electricity and water. For a deeper guide to recognizing the tricks, the expanded Bullshit Detector is available through Tom Hicks Media.

The claim: Trump said Iran’s Kharg Island was being “blown to smithereens” and attached dramatic footage of explosions as evidence.

Bullshit.

Why: Reuters found no independent evidence that Kharg was under attack, and neither the White House nor the Pentagon provided confirmation. Detection software indicated the footage was most likely artificially generated. Trump used an unverified, likely synthetic video to announce a military attack that nobody could confirm. That’s geopolitical fan fiction with missiles attached. Reuters

The claim: The Trump administration says sharply weaker fuel-economy requirements are “common sense” because they’ll let Detroit build the vehicles Americans want.

Bullshit.

Why: The proposed standard would lower the required 2031 fleetwide average from 50.4 miles per gallon to 34.5. People can debate vehicle prices and consumer choice, but fewer miles per gallon means buying more gasoline. The administration is selling thirstier cars as consumer freedom while ignoring what drivers will spend keeping them on the road. Reuters

The claim: Trump says communities resisting new data centers want to remain “backwards and poor” and will have only themselves to blame when the projects go elsewhere.

Bullshit.

Why: Residents have raised legitimate concerns about utility costs, water consumption, noise, lost farmland, and enormous tax incentives. Even JD Vance acknowledged that much of the backlash happens when data centers raise electricity prices for nearby residents. Apparently, listening to your own vice president is now another sign of backwardness. The Guardian

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

The world doesn’t need more information. It needs better filters. The full Off Script Bullshit Detector helps you separate facts from spin, statistics from manipulation, and honest arguments from complete bullshit.

The guide is free to all Off Script subscribers. Everyone else can get it for $4.95 through the Tom Hicks Media Store. No talking points. No team jerseys. Just the claim, the evidence, and the verdict.

Seen some bullshit making the rounds today? Drop it in the comments. We may put it through the Detector.

ELSEWHERE ACROSS TOM HICKS MEDIA

LOTUS PURRSPECTIVE

Lotus has determined that every closed cabinet is an admission of guilt. Her human insists there’s nothing inside for her, which is exactly what someone concealing evidence would say. The investigation continues until every door is opened or somebody produces tuna.

TOM’S NUMBER ONES

Today’s musical time machine lands on September 1, 1943, when Bing Crosby, Louis Jordan and the biggest records in America were fighting a world war with rhythm, romance and an excellent suit. Six charts tell the story of one day in music without pretending modern genre boundaries had already been invented. The photographs alone are worth the trip.

PANIC ROOM SPORTS

Panic Room Sports drops today with the NFL’s roster picture coming into focus and fantasy managers already trying to trade half-eaten bags of Skittles for somebody’s best player. The new and improved fantasy draft guide is included for anyone who would rather enter draft night with a board than a prayer. Everyone reacts, but we’ll check the tape first.

RABBIT EARS CLASSIC TV

Rabbit Ears Classic TV returns Thursday with another trip into the stories television left behind. The shows are familiar, but the production battles, strange decisions, and cultural afterlives usually aren’t. We remember what aired, then look for what happened when the cameras stopped.

THE BACKLOT GHOST

The Backlot Ghost returns Wednesday for another walk through classic Hollywood after the studio lights go dark. Every famous movie leaves something behind, and some of those stories are considerably less comfortable than the commemorative Blu-ray would have you believe. Bring a flashlight if it makes you feel better.

KEEP OFF SCRIPT INDEPENDENT

Off Script doesn’t have a corporate newsroom, a billionaire owner, or a political committee quietly paying the electric bill. It has reporting, verification, and readers who believe somebody should call bullshit while it’s still warm.

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A paid subscription helps keep that work alive and lets every Tom Hicks Media publication keep growing without asking permission from the people being covered.

BUY ME A CUP OF TEA

If you’d rather make a one-time contribution, you can buy me a cup of tea. It helps cover research, publishing costs, and the assorted small expenses that multiply when you publish every day. I’ll provide the tea, the profanity and the deeply unhealthy interest in federal lawsuits.

ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

Trump’s gasoline pitch works because people see a low number and desperately want it to be true. Most of us don’t have time to investigate refineries and commercial fuel contracts while standing beside a pump. When a politician claims credit for lowering prices, what proof would you need before believing him?

#DonaldTrump #GasPrices #FreedomFuel #Venezuela #Oil #Energy #Politics #BullshitDetector #OffScriptWithTomHicks #TomHicksMedia

EDITORIAL NOTE

Josef Palermo’s firsthand account of his 10 months inside the Kennedy Center was published by The Atlantic on April 17. This article revisits that account because the legal battle over Donald Trump’s control of the Kennedy Center exploded again last week, putting the institution’s governance right back in front of a federal judge. Where Palermo makes allegations or describes events that the Kennedy Center disputes, I’ll tell you that. (The Atlantic)

There’s something almost perfect about the fact that we’re arguing over Donald Trump’s name again.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper spent nearly two hours questioning lawyers over the Kennedy Center board’s latest plan to put Trump’s name back on the building. Cooper ruled in May that the board had exceeded its authority when it renamed the institution, and Trump’s name was subsequently removed. The board came back in August with another idea: keep John F. Kennedy’s name, add “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” underneath it, and rename the grounds President Donald J. Trump Plaza. (Reuters)

By Thursday night, the Justice Department had agreed to hold off until at least October 8 while Cooper considers what the hell to do with this latest maneuver. DOJ insists this isn’t another renaming. Rep. Joyce Beatty’s lawyers call it defiance of the earlier court order. (ABC News)

That’s the fight everybody can see.

The uglier story is what happened behind the doors.

The Man Who Ran Toward the Fire

Josef Palermo wasn’t some career Trump antagonist waiting around for a chance to throw a grenade. He joined the Kennedy Center after Trump’s takeover even though he hadn’t voted for him, believing the institution was too important to abandon. Palermo became its first curator of visual arts and special programming and went in hoping he could still build something worthwhile. (The Atlantic)

Ten months later, he was out.

When Palermo was laid off in March, he said employees could receive an additional month of severance benefits if they signed confidentiality and nondisparagement provisions. He refused. A few weeks later, he published his account of what he says he saw happening inside the Kennedy Center and began cooperating with an investigation led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse while also communicating with Beatty’s legal team. (The Atlantic)

Maybe we should have paid more attention.

When a Cultural Institution Starts Looking Like a Political Fundraiser

Palermo says one of the clearest changes was the way Trump’s connection to the Kennedy Center became part of the fundraising pitch. That wasn’t merely his impression. A Les Misérables fundraiser offered a $2 million package that included a performance box, a VIP reception, and a photo opportunity with Trump. (The Washington Post)

One of Palermo’s colleagues, a veteran of Republican campaigns, described what was happening this way: “We are grafting political management principles into a nonpolitical organization.” (The Atlantic)

That sentence does a hell of a lot of work.

Political fundraising works on access, proximity, and influence. Cultural institutions survive on donors too, obviously, but a national memorial shouldn’t begin feeling like somebody slipped a campaign finance operation into the orchestra pit.

And then they started messing with the rooms.

Apparently History Has a Sponsorship Rate

The Kennedy Center’s historic lounges weren’t random cocktail rooms. Many were gifts connected to international cultural diplomacy, spaces carrying decades of history and symbolism. Palermo says the new leadership began treating those spaces as sponsorship opportunities. (The Atlantic)

At an October 7 memorial exhibition in the Israeli Lounge, Grenell told a predominantly Jewish audience that donors needed to help pay for the room’s renovations or the space could eventually go to another sponsor. Jewish Insider independently reported his pitch months before Palermo published his account, including Grenell’s warning that “it certainly would be a shame if we lost this room.” (Jewish Insider)

That’s fundraising with all the subtlety of a guy standing outside your restaurant admiring how flammable the curtains look.

The Circles Lounge became the SyberJet Lounge after an aircraft manufacturer paid for naming rights. Its CEO had previously been convicted of defrauding investors and received a Trump pardon in 2025. The African Room was transformed into a space honoring America’s intelligence community, while its historic African textiles, sculpture, and carved wooden doors were removed. (The Atlantic)

Here’s where the original viral version of this story went too far: those African artifacts weren’t simply “missing.” Palermo said nobody told him where they had gone, but a current staffer told The Atlantic they were in the Kennedy Center archives, and a spokesperson said they had been moved there for safekeeping during construction. That distinction matters. (The Atlantic)

The underlying story is disturbing enough. We don’t need to bullshit it up.

Then the Ethical Lines Started Getting Awfully Fuzzy

Palermo also described a request from one of Grenell’s top deputies concerning an artist whose work Grenell personally owned. According to Palermo, the deputy asked whether the Kennedy Center could “do something with him.” Palermo believed displaying that artist could increase the value of the work and potentially benefit Grenell financially, so he ignored the request. (The Atlantic)

That doesn’t prove a corruption scheme. Palermo himself framed it as a potential ethical breach, and that’s where the evidence stops.

But Jesus Christ, we’re talking about the Kennedy Center.

If the president of a national arts institution owns an artist’s work, somebody on his staff shouldn’t be nudging the curator about featuring that artist. You shouldn’t need an ethics seminar and a 47-page compliance manual to figure that one out.

“Get Rid of Everything”

Then Palermo says Grenell gave him the order that stopped him cold.

Palermo told PBS that Grenell instructed him to oversee removing artwork from the Kennedy Center before its renovation. In his Atlantic account, Palermo said Grenell told him to “get rid of everything” in the permanent collection because new art was wanted for the reopening. If donors wouldn’t pay to remove their works, Palermo said Grenell suggested they could be auctioned or given away. (PBS)

Palermo immediately thought about the enormous brass bust of John F. Kennedy in the Grand Foyer.

The Robert Berks sculpture is eight feet tall and weighs roughly 3,000 pounds. Palermo reported Grenell’s directive to another senior leader, who, according to Palermo, looked stunned and told him not to act on it. (The Atlantic)

That bust is still there.

Think about the obscenity of the image for a second. A building created by Congress as a living memorial to an assassinated president, while its own visual arts curator says he was being told to start clearing the permanent collection that surrounds Kennedy’s gigantic bronze likeness.

And people want to talk about the fucking sign.

There Was Money for Gold

Palermo’s account gets almost comical around the edges, except none of this is particularly funny.

He described a leaking roof, visibly rotting willow trees outside the Grand Foyer and financial trouble serious enough that a colleague told him the Kennedy Center hadn’t paid invoices from the company handling its fundraising postage. Meanwhile, he says one of the renovation priorities was adding gold gilding to the chandelier in the presidential box. (The Atlantic)

Two former colleagues also told Palermo that Grenell had tasked them with planning an America’s Got Talent-style talent show for the country’s 250th anniversary. That was apparently one proposed vision for celebrating America at its national cultural center. (The Atlantic)

Maybe the winner could’ve gotten naming rights to the coatroom.

This Week Made the Old Story New Again

The temptation here is to treat Palermo’s story as April news that we somehow missed.

I don’t think that works anymore.

Last week, the board was once again in court defending another plan to put Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center. Justice Department lawyers have argued that Trump’s involvement is important to fundraising for the renovation and warned in court filings that without the planned work, the deteriorating complex could ultimately face demolition. Meanwhile, The Washington Post obtained internal documents showing that ticket revenue and fundraising deteriorated sharply after Trump’s name was originally added to the building. (Reuters)

The Kennedy Center and Trump’s allies dispute the idea that his takeover caused its financial problems. They argue that Trump inherited an institution already in serious trouble and that his involvement secured major renovation funding and new donor commitments. Grenell also disputed earlier reporting about fundraising turmoil, calling it fake news based on anonymous gossip, and the Center has challenged portions of Palermo’s account. (The Atlantic)

Good. Put all of that on the table.

It still leaves one gigantic problem.

Nobody Should Own This Place

This isn’t ultimately about whether Donald Trump’s name belongs on a marble wall. Congress and the courts can wrestle with that question until everybody involved qualifies for Social Security.

The real issue is whether any president should be able to seize effective control of the governing board of a national cultural institution, install allies, become chairman, reshape its management and leave the rest of us relying on lawsuits to figure out where the guardrails were supposed to be. Trump broke with past practice by removing Biden-appointed trustees before their terms expired, appointed his own allies and became the first sitting president to chair the Kennedy Center board. (The Atlantic)

That structure is why Palermo’s final recommendation matters more today than it did in April. He wants Congress to build a firewall preventing another political takeover of the Kennedy Center. A fresh Atlantic examination this weekend reached much the same structural problem: judges can restrain specific board actions, but only Congress can fundamentally rewrite how the place is governed. (The Atlantic)

I’d go further.

Write the rules so the next Democratic president can’t do it either. Or the Republican after that. Or whichever narcissistic peacock eventually decides the Kennedy Center needs his portrait hanging over the urinals.

National institutions have to survive the people temporarily entrusted with them.

That’s what stewardship means.

And somewhere inside that building, Robert Berks’ 3,000-pound John F. Kennedy is still staring across the Grand Foyer.

For now.

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FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

Bullshit: Noncitizens are flooding American elections.

Why: Trump and his allies are escalating claims about noncitizen voting ahead of the midterms. DHS has claimed, without producing evidence, that 250,000 noncitizens may be registered in four states. The Associated Press notes that actual noncitizen voting is extremely rare, already illegal, punishable as a felony, and potentially grounds for deportation. Screaming louder doesn’t turn a rare crime into an election epidemic. (AP News)

Bullshit: Free speech protections disappear when the speaker isn’t a citizen.

Why: A federal judge in California ruled Friday that the government can’t use immigration law to punish noncitizen students for protected political speech about Israel, Palestinians, or other issues. The judge found First and Fifth Amendment problems with the administration’s policy after international students reported censoring themselves out of fear of deportation. Immigration enforcement is a legitimate government power. Turning it into a political speech detector is another thing entirely. (AP News)

Bullshit: The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s birthright-citizenship order, so just write another one.

Why: The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s original attempt to restrict birthright citizenship in June. Trump signed a narrower order in August anyway, carving out several categories including so-called birth tourism. A federal judge declined to block it Friday because the challengers hadn’t formally updated their lawsuit, while simultaneously questioning whether the new exceptions had any basis in the Supreme Court’s ruling and calling the approach unprecedented. That isn’t vindication. That’s a procedural timeout. (Reuters)

Bullshit: Say “national security” and the courts have to stop asking questions.

Why: The Pentagon labeled AI company Anthropic a national-security supply-chain risk after the company refused unrestricted use of its Claude technology for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. On Thursday, a federal judge blocked the designation and called it “illegal and baseless,” finding the government couldn’t simply invoke national security to retaliate against a critic. The Pentagon says the fight was contractual rather than ideological. The court wasn’t buying it. (Reuters)

From Off Script: The Bullshit Detector cuts through political spin, manufactured outrage, and claims that collapse the second somebody bothers checking them. The full Bullshit Detector guide is free to Off Script subscribers or available separately for $4.95 at the Tom Hicks Media Store.

AROUND TOM HICKS MEDIA

Lotus Purrspective: The world continues to make questionable decisions, and Lotus continues to document them from the only management position that matters: whichever piece of furniture she currently occupies.

Tom’s Number Ones: Six charts, one date and a trip through the music that was actually sitting at No. 1. The daily time machine keeps running.

Panic Room Sports: Football gets loud fast. Panic Room Sports is back Tuesday to figure out which panic is justified before everybody starts setting their fantasy roster on fire.

Rabbit Ears Classic TV: A new edition drops today, digging back into the television that once had millions of Americans watching the same thing at the same damn time.

The Backlot Ghost: Wednesday, we head back behind the studio gates for another story from classic Hollywood where the movie usually turns out to be the least interesting thing that happened.

Blind Spot: Off Script’s Sunday deep dive keeps going after the stories that deserve more than a headline, a quote, and 11 seconds of cable-news screaming.

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

Should Congress change the Kennedy Center’s governing structure so no future president, Republican or Democrat, can take control of it this way again?

I’d really like to hear where you land on this one.

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By Tom Hicks | August 30, 2026

Wyoming Wasn’t Supposed To Be The Problem

If I told you state officials were complaining about aggressive Trump Justice Department election monitors showing up at polling places, you might guess California. Maybe New York. You probably wouldn’t start with Wyoming, where Donald Trump won by almost 46 points in 2024, and Republicans control damn near everything worth controlling. That’s exactly why Wyoming is such a good place to begin.

Republican Gov. Mark Gordon ordered his attorney general to investigate after two DOJ monitors appeared during the August 18 primary in Laramie County. Gordon described their conduct as “aggressive” and “irregular,” while County Clerk Debra Lee said they sought voter interviews, information about poll-worker training and access to voting equipment. Lee refused some of those requests, and nobody has alleged that the monitors altered a vote or affected the result.

Gordon’s reaction was about as Wyoming as you’d expect. He said he doesn’t like Washington coming for the state’s guns, and he doesn’t like Washington coming for its votes either. When the Republican governor of one of the reddest states in America starts wondering what Donald Trump’s Justice Department is doing around his voting machines, I’m inclined to put down my drink and listen.

First, The Part That’s Completely Normal

The Justice Department has monitored elections for decades, and that by itself is no scandal. The Civil Rights Division sends attorneys, staff and, where legally authorized, federal observers to watch for violations of federal voting-rights laws. It’s legitimate work that has helped protect voters from discrimination, intimidation and barriers to casting a ballot.

The Biden Justice Department monitored 64 jurisdictions in 24 states during the 2022 general election and 86 jurisdictions in 27 states in 2024. Those are jurisdiction counts rather than individual personnel, so comparing them directly with this year’s planned 1,000 monitors would be bullshit in its own right. The important point is that federal monitoring didn’t suddenly begin when Trump returned to office.

That’s worth establishing before we go any further. The question isn’t whether federal election monitoring is inherently sinister, because it isn’t. The question is what this Justice Department is monitoring, how far its people believe their authority extends, and what else is happening around the election at the same time.

Now Let’s Talk About The 1,000

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, says the department plans to deploy roughly 1,000 federal monitors for the November midterms. CBS News reported that Dhillon described it as a record deployment, while DOJ says the mission is neutral enforcement of federal election law rather than taking control of local election administration. That assurance matters and belongs in this story.

DOJ has already sent more than 80 monitors across seven states and more than 200 polling locations during this year’s primary season. Its own announcements describe the work as promoting transparency, ballot security, and communication with local election officials. Then Wyoming gave us an example of what can happen when federal officials and local officials have very different ideas about where monitoring ends.

Wyoming doesn’t prove November will be abusive. It proves that questions about the boundaries aren’t theoretical anymore. If you’re about to put roughly a thousand federal monitors into an already combustible election, the dress rehearsal is worth watching.

KEEP READING THE BLIND SPOT

So far we’ve got a legitimate federal function, a dramatically expanded deployment, and one Republican state already asking questions about how that function was exercised. None of that proves some grand plan to interfere with the election. The picture changes when we start adding the other pieces.

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The Voter Rolls

The Justice Department has spent months demanding statewide voter-registration lists and suing governments that won’t hand them over. By April 1, DOJ said it had sued 30 states and the District of Columbia, and the list includes Republican states such as Idaho, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia. This is much broader than Trump simply picking fights with Democratic governors.

DOJ says federal election laws give the attorney general authority to obtain and analyze those voter files. In May, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel went further, concluding that federal law permits DOJ to share statewide registration data with Homeland Security so it can be cross-checked against other government databases for voter-fraud investigations. That’s the administration’s legal position, and courts may ultimately decide where its limits are.

At the same time, the administration has vastly expanded the use of Homeland Security’s SAVE system to check voter eligibility. By May, more than 67 million registrations had been run through the system, while voting-rights groups warned that database mismatches can flag legitimate citizens along with genuinely questionable records. The administration says the effort protects election integrity, while critics say an imperfect immigration database is a dangerous tool for determining who gets to vote.

Nobody has to invent a nationwide purge to find that consequential. The federal government now has more voter information, more tools for cross-checking it and more involvement in decisions that can eventually determine whether somebody remains registered. Keep that piece on the table.

Then There’s Your Mailbox

Trump has attacked mail voting for years despite using it himself, and this year the fight moved from rhetoric into federal policy. His executive order sought to create new requirements involving voter lists, mail ballots and the Postal Service, prompting lawsuits from states and voting-rights organizations that argue the president is invading authority belonging to states and Congress. The administration says it’s closing election-security gaps.

The Supreme Court recently lifted one legal obstacle on procedural grounds, but it didn’t rule that Trump’s plan is constitutional. Once the Postal Service finalized the rules needed to carry it out, another round of litigation began almost immediately. That distinction matters because “Supreme Court lets Trump do it” is much simpler than what actually happened.

On August 28, federal Judge Indira Talwani temporarily blocked the newest version, saying states didn’t have enough time to overhaul their systems before mail voting begins. The Trump administration appealed the next day, and nearly one-third of voters used mail ballots in 2024. We are now litigating major rules governing those ballots with the election barely two months away.

So put another piece on the table. The administration is fighting for voter data while simultaneously fighting to change how millions of mail ballots move through the system. Whatever courts ultimately allow, nobody can credibly describe this White House as taking a hands-off approach to the mechanics of the 2026 election.

A Lot Of The Old Guardrails Are Gone

ProPublica did something very similar to what we’re doing here, except with the federal personnel who helped keep the 2020 election from being overturned. Its investigation found at least 75 career officials involved with election integrity or security are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned. Roughly two dozen Trump appointees have moved into positions capable of affecting elections, and ten were involved in efforts to reverse the 2020 result.

Nearly all of the roughly 30 career lawyers who once worked in the Civil Rights Division’s voting section have also resigned or been moved, according to ProPublica. The Trump administration says these changes redirected agencies toward their proper missions and away from activities it considered political or outside their statutory authority. That defense belongs here too, because personnel changes alone don’t prove wrongdoing.

They do change the institutional environment. In 2020, Trump appointees, including Attorney General Bill Barr, eventually told him things he didn’t want to hear and refused to help overturn his loss. A lot of the people who formed that kind of resistance aren’t sitting in those chairs anymore.

Who Watches The Justice Department?

This may be the piece that bothers me most.

Reuters reported this month that DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates misconduct by department lawyers, has dropped from 29 employees to 16 during Trump’s second term. OPR opened only seven new investigations in fiscal 2025, its lowest number in roughly two decades, while receiving a record 1,666 complaints. DOJ says the office remains capable of performing its duties.

The Justice Department Inspector General’s office has lost another 99 employees. Former officials told Reuters that politically sensitive investigations have become more difficult, while DOJ maintains that misconduct allegations continue to receive appropriate scrutiny. None of this means election monitors have suddenly been freed from every legal and ethical restraint.

But here’s the equation I can’t get past. DOJ is dramatically increasing the number of federal personnel watching an election while some of the internal machinery responsible for investigating DOJ misconduct is getting smaller and less active. The people watching the election are multiplying while some of the people watching the watchers are disappearing.

That should bother you whether your preferred political hat is red, blue or made entirely out of cheese.

“The Republicans Ought To Nationalize The Voting”

This whole thing would be considerably easier to shrug off if Donald Trump had spent the year emphasizing the traditional state role in running elections. He hasn’t. In February, he publicly said Republicans should “take over the voting” and “nationalize the voting,” suggesting action in roughly 15 locations while again making unsupported claims about widespread illegal voting.

The Constitution gives states primary responsibility for the times, places and manner of congressional elections while allowing Congress to make or alter those rules. It doesn’t give the president general authority to take over elections because he thinks a state is crooked. The White House has framed Trump’s comments around national voter-ID and proof-of-citizenship proposals, which is its explanation and deserves to be included.

Here’s where a little selective outrage is completely appropriate. If Barack Obama had gone on a podcast and said Democrats should take over voting in 15 states before a midterm election, Fox News would’ve needed asbestos curtains around the graphics department. We wouldn’t have spent six months patiently discussing whether everybody was misunderstanding him.

Presidents shouldn’t talk like that about elections. Period.

And What About ICE Or The National Guard?

In May, Trump was asked directly whether he would send National Guard troops or ICE officers to voting locations in November. He didn’t rule it out, saying he would do whatever was necessary to ensure “honest elections.” The White House and DHS have said there’s no announced plan to put ICE agents at polling places, and federal law sharply restricts the presence of armed federal personnel around elections.

There’s a world of difference between DOJ lawyers lawfully monitoring compliance with voting-rights statutes and armed immigration officers standing near people waiting to vote. State election officials have been preparing for the possibility precisely because the administration’s public messages haven’t closed the door on it. That doesn’t mean it will happen.

I’d be delighted if that entire concern looks ridiculous by November 4. I’d also be delighted if somebody in the White House would simply make it ridiculous now by saying armed federal agents won’t be showing up at polling places. So far, Trump himself hasn’t done that.

Could Trump Cancel The Midterms?

No.

Federal law sets congressional Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November of every even-numbered year. The Constitution places congressional election regulation with the states and Congress, not the president. Donald Trump can’t simply sign an executive order on November 2 saying everybody gets the day off and we’ll try democracy again sometime after Christmas.

I want that answer stated plainly because there’s enough real shit happening without inventing powers the president doesn’t possess. There isn’t a general presidential emergency authority that lets him cancel congressional elections because he dislikes the political environment. If somebody tells you Trump can legally call off the midterms by himself, they’re wrong.

The reason we’re dipping a toe into this water at all is that Trump keeps putting the water in front of us. At a January 6 House Republican retreat, he raised the idea of canceling the election while simultaneously saying the press would accuse him of being a dictator if he suggested such a thing. Days later, during a Reuters interview in which he discussed the possibility of Republican midterm losses, he said his administration was doing so well that “we shouldn’t even have an election.”

The White House said he was joking. Maybe he was. I’ve told jokes too, although mine usually aren’t followed by federal lawsuits for voter rolls, attempts to change mail-ballot rules, talk about nationalizing voting, and a thousand Justice Department monitors.

Context has a nasty habit of screwing up the punch line.

Canceling The Election Is The Wrong Question

I don’t think the most plausible threat to the 2026 midterms is Trump walking to a podium and declaring that there won’t be an election. The legal barriers are enormous; states would resist, Congress has statutory authority, and the lawsuits would begin before he finished the sentence. Fixating on that movie version can actually distract us from things that are happening in broad daylight.

A president doesn’t have to cancel Election Day to make an election harder to administer. Eligibility disputes can knock voters into bureaucratic limbo, federal rules can create confusion around mail ballots, litigation can keep changing instructions as voting begins, and federal personnel can create conflicts with state officials about who has authority to do what. None of that requires tanks outside the elementary school gym.

And a president doesn’t have to stop people from voting to attack the legitimacy of what they produce.

We’ve already seen that movie.

What Happens If Republicans Are Losing?

That’s the question I keep coming back to, because Trump himself has made the stakes personal. In January he warned House Republicans that if they lose the midterms, Democrats will find a reason to impeach him. He has also continued to falsely insist that he won the 2020 election, so imagining him calmly accepting every close Democratic victory in November requires us to ignore five years of evidence about how he reacts to losing.

Picture November 3 without inventing anything. Republicans are losing several close House races, thousands of mail ballots remain uncounted, federal monitors are present in contested jurisdictions, and lawsuits are already flying. Maybe everything works exactly as it should.

I hope it does.

But if Trump starts claiming fraud before the count is complete, he would be doing it with a Justice Department far more aligned with him than the one he had in 2020, a massive federal voter-data effort already underway and many of the election-security officials who resisted his first attempt gone. That doesn’t tell us what will happen. It tells us what the playing field looks like if something does.

You’ve Seen Every Piece Of This Before

That may be the most important part of this story.

The thousand DOJ monitors were a story. Wyoming was another story, the voter-roll lawsuits were another, the Postal Service fight was another, the disappearance of election-security officials was another, Trump’s nationalize-the-voting comment was another, and the shrinking DOJ watchdog offices were another. News moves so fast now that each piece gets its twelve-hour turn in the outrage machine before the next one shoves it off the bar stool.

Put them together, and you don’t get proof that Donald Trump has a secret plan to cancel the midterms. You get something more useful: a federal government exerting considerably more pressure on the mechanics of an election while some of the institutional restraints around that power have weakened. That’s an observable fact, and we don’t need to decorate it with a conspiracy theory.

Maybe every safeguard holds. Maybe the courts establish clear boundaries, DOJ’s monitors behave exactly as promised, eligible voters remain registered, mail ballots move normally, and November 3 turns out to be an ordinary American election. I sincerely hope the most embarrassing thing about this article in December is that I worried too much.

I’d happily take that deal.

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

TRUMP SAYS NEVADA TIPPED WORKERS SAVED AN AVERAGE $10,000 IN TAXES

BULLSHIT RULING: THE DEDUCTION ISN’T THE SAVINGS.

Trump says 440,000 tipped workers in Nevada saved an average $10,000 on their taxes because of “no tax on tips.” FactCheck.org found no federal data supporting either the worker count or the claimed savings, and Trump appears to be confusing the amount deducted from taxable income with the amount actually saved in taxes. A $10,000 deduction for a worker in a 12% marginal bracket would save roughly $1,200, which is a lovely tax break but considerably less lovely than pretending $1,200 is $10,000.

VANCE SAYS TRUMP “SEALED THE BORDER,” SO MAINE OVERDOSES FELL

BULLSHIT RULING: THE DECLINE STARTED BEFORE TRUMP GOT THERE.

JD Vance credited Trump’s border policies for Maine’s falling overdose deaths, but the decline was already underway during the Biden administration. Maine fatal overdoses fell from 2022 to 2023, again in 2024, and about another 20% in 2025, while researchers point to several factors including changes in fentanyl supply, treatment, and expanded naloxone access. Taking sole credit for a trend that started before you entered the building isn’t causation; it’s walking into the fourth inning and demanding credit for the first three runs.

BYRON DONALDS BLAMES MEASLES OUTBREAKS ON “RAMPANT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION”

BULLSHIT RULING: THE EVIDENCE POINTS TO FALLING VACCINATION RATES.

Florida Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds said illegal immigration under Biden caused measles outbreaks around the country. Infectious-disease experts told PolitiFact the primary driver is declining MMR vaccination rates, and no available data ties the outbreaks to immigrants living in the country illegally. About 94% of confirmed 2026 cases have occurred among people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status wasn’t known, which seems like a more useful place to look than whichever border talking point happened to be lying around.

NORTH CAROLINA “PROCESSED” MORE THAN A MILLION DUPLICATE VOTER REGISTRATIONS

BULLSHIT RULING: TRUE NUMBER, BULLSHIT IMPLICATION.

More than a million North Carolinians who were already registered submitted another registration application before the 2024 election, so the number circulating online is real. What the viral claim leaves out is that those people weren’t added to the voter rolls a second time, and state officials say the duplicate applications had “absolutely no relationship” to election results. This is exactly how election bullshit works best: start with a real number, remove the explanation, place it next to an election result, and let frightened people invent the crime for you.

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

We know a president can’t legally cancel the November midterms on his own. What I’m more interested in is whether everything already happening around the election makes you more concerned about what could happen before, during, or after Election Day. Which piece of this picture bothers you most?

ONE LAST THING

I’m not telling you Donald Trump is going to cancel the midterm elections. I’m telling you that a president who tried to overturn one election loss, still says that election was stolen, has talked about nationalizing voting and now oversees a federal government becoming far more involved in the mechanics of this election. Those facts belong in the same conversation.

Maybe November goes beautifully. I hope it does, because wanting the warning to be right would be a pretty fucked-up definition of winning. The best possible ending to this story is a boring Election Day followed by accurate counts, accepted results and everybody going home.

Until then, watch the pieces.

The government will be watching the election. Somebody ought to be watching the government.

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EDITORIAL NOTE

This is commentary based on reporting from Reuters, The Associated Press and Reason, along with statements from the Department of Homeland Security. DHS says Milo Yiannopoulos entered the United States legally in 2019, overstayed, missed an immigration hearing and was subsequently ordered removed by an immigration judge. Yiannopoulos hadn’t publicly responded to the allegations as of Friday evening, and it wasn’t clear whether he’d obtained an attorney. Sources: Reuters · Associated Press

There are moments when the universe makes a joke so fucking perfect that trying to improve it would only ruin the timing. Milo Yiannopoulos, the British far-right provocateur who spent years demanding a merciless American immigration crackdown, is now sitting in ICE custody awaiting removal from the United States. The man wanted immigration enforcement with fewer brakes, fewer excuses and considerably less sympathy. Then somebody apparently looked at his paperwork. Sources: Reuters · Associated Press

ICE arrested Yiannopoulos Thursday at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in Louisiana. DHS says he legally entered the United States through New York on May 14, 2019, but later overstayed and failed to appear for an immigration hearing. An immigration judge issued a final removal order on July 22, and DHS says he’ll remain in custody pending removal. That’s a remarkably tidy chain of events for a man who’s spent years arguing that immigration enforcement hasn’t been nearly ruthless enough. Sources: Reuters · Associated Press

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Ordinarily, this would be a fairly routine immigration story involving a foreign national who apparently ran afoul of the rules governing his stay. Milo, however, spent years making sure there’d be absolutely nothing routine about this particular moment. He’s been one of the loudest advocates for treating immigration enforcement less like a legal process and more like a fucking cattle roundup. That makes the arrival of ICE at his own doorstep considerably more interesting.

Last year, Yiannopoulos called for ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings in California. His proposed finishing touch was deportation on the spot for people who couldn’t prove legal residency. The beauty of that system, presumably, was that Milo always imagined himself standing comfortably on the other side of the checkpoint watching somebody else get hauled away. It’s amazing how uncomplicated government power looks when you’re certain you’re never going to be underneath it. Source: Reason

He also declared, “Zero immigration for the next 20 years. No ifs, no buts,” according to the Associated Press. Elsewhere, he’d argued that the United States needed to deport millions upon millions of people because nothing else mattered without that. This wasn’t a guy reluctantly accepting immigration enforcement as an unfortunate necessity. He was practically standing outside ICE headquarters shaking pompoms. Sources: Associated Press · Reason

And that’s where this stops being merely funny, because Milo’s hardly the first person to fall in love with government power while assuming the government will always use it against somebody he dislikes. That’s one of the oldest scams in politics. Give the state enormous authority, strip away annoying little inconveniences such as restraint and discretion, then convince yourself that you and your friends will always be standing behind the guy holding the club. History has repeatedly demonstrated that the club doesn’t sign loyalty agreements.

Yiannopoulos actually supplied the perfect explanation of his own thinking years ago during an appearance with Joe Rogan. Talking about immigration, he distinguished the people he wanted thrown out from people like himself, the charming British immigrant who apparently belonged here because, well, he was Milo. The rules were supposed to be merciless right up until the moment those rules encountered someone important enough to deserve an exception. Apparently the immigration system forgot to check the guest list. Source: Reason

That’s the part of hard-line immigration politics its loudest cheerleaders rarely advertise. “Enforce the law” sounds wonderfully simple until laws collide with paperwork mistakes, missed hearings, asylum claims, families, employers, long-established lives, conflicting records, and actual human beings. Suddenly everybody discovers that due process wasn’t invented because lawyers needed something to do between lunch and golf. It exists because government gets awfully fucking dangerous when nobody has to stop and explain what it’s doing.

Now Milo gets his turn inside that machinery, and I don’t know whether he’s got some legal argument that could delay or reverse his removal. Neither does anybody casually celebrating his detention on social media. He should get whatever process the law permits, be able to obtain representation, and be treated humanely while he’s detained. I believe that for exactly the same reason I believe it when the person in ICE custody isn’t an asshole who spent years fantasizing about everybody else’s deportation.

That’s the difference between having principles and wearing a team jersey. Rights worth defending don’t disappear because the person standing on them makes your skin crawl. If your belief in due process lasts only until somebody you hate needs it, you don’t actually believe in due process. You’ve just got a list of people you think should qualify.

None of that means we’ve got to pretend the irony isn’t magnificent. Yiannopoulos wanted ICE agents stationed outside supermarkets checking whether strangers had the right to remain in the country. He wanted people who couldn’t establish their legal status deported immediately. He wanted immigration enforcement stripped of the compassion, discretion and procedural patience he may now discover are remarkably attractive qualities when you’re the one waiting to find out where the government plans to send you. Source: Reason

There’s also something wonderfully revealing about what happened immediately afterward. Far-right activist Laura Loomer, who’s feuded with Yiannopoulos for years, celebrated his arrest and claimed she’d previously reported his immigration status to authorities. Whether anything Loomer did actually led to his arrest hasn’t been established, and taking her claim at face value would require a level of optimism I don’t currently possess. Still, watching MAGA personalities use immigration enforcement against one another like neighbors calling code enforcement over a crooked fence tells you plenty about where this kind of politics eventually goes. Source: Associated Press

Build a government machine powerful enough to crush your enemies and sooner or later somebody you’ve pissed off gets the keys. That’s the lesson here, and it’s considerably bigger than Milo Yiannopoulos. Government power doesn’t become harmless because the people exercising it share your politics today. Powers created for the bastard you hate can eventually be used by the bastard who hates you.

Milo wanted an immigration system that’d stop asking so many questions and start throwing people out. He wanted fewer excuses, less discretion and a whole lot more ICE. Well, congratulations, Milo. You finally got the immigration policy you ordered.

THE RECORD

Yiannopoulos is a British citizen who legally entered the United States through New York in May 2019, according to DHS. The department says he later overstayed and failed to appear for an immigration hearing, leading an immigration judge to issue a final removal order on July 22. ICE arrested him August 27 at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and DHS says he’ll remain in custody pending removal. As of Friday evening, neither Reuters nor AP reported a public response from Yiannopoulos to DHS’s account. Sources: Reuters · Associated Press

His own immigration rhetoric is equally well documented. Yiannopoulos has advocated widespread ICE checkpoints, immediate deportation for people unable to prove lawful status, and the removal of millions of immigrants, while also calling for “zero immigration” for two decades. Those aren’t somebody else’s characterization of his position. They’re the policies he wanted right up until the machinery carrying them out found him. Sources: Associated Press · Reason

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

TRUMP SAYS SOUTH KOREA HAS 39,000 AMERICAN TROOPS AND BASICALLY WASN’T PAYING

Bullshit: FALSE AND INFLATED.

Why: Trump said the United States has 39,000 troops in South Korea and claimed Seoul had essentially failed to pay before he negotiated a roughly $3 billion annual contribution. AFP checked the public record and found about 26,500 U.S. troops are stationed there, while finding no evidence South Korea agreed to the $3 billion figure Trump described during his first term. South Korea has shared the cost of stationing American forces there since 1991, so portraying the arrangement as America footing the whole damn bill until Trump arrived doesn’t survive contact with the record. Source: AFP Fact Check

SUSAN COLLINS’ CAMPAIGN SAYS MAINE HIGH SCHOOLS FELL TO DEAD LAST

Bullshit: MISLEADING AS HELL.

Why: A Collins campaign ad blames Democratic Senate challenger Troy Jackson for Maine high schools ranking 51st in U.S. News’ state rankings. What it doesn’t mention is that Maine stopped allowing U.S. News access to AP performance data, a major piece of the ranking formula, and other states that withheld the same data also plunged toward the bottom. Maine’s education department says it stopped authorizing the data sharing because of student privacy concerns, which is a pretty important piece of context when you’re using the resulting ranking to beat somebody over the head in a campaign commercial. Source: FactCheck.org

SIX MONTHS INTO THE IRAN WAR, TRUMP POSTS “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”

Bullshit: YOU’VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME.

Why: Trump repeatedly sold the Iran war as a short operation, at one point describing it as a “little excursion,” but six months later the conflict’s still going and the United States has spent more than $37.5 billion. The administration’s shifting more heavily toward economic pressure, negotiations remain stalled, and Trump now says he’s in no hurry for diplomacy. Posting an AI-generated “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 2026” image while the mission remains conspicuously unaccomplished isn’t optimism. It’s George W. Bush’s banner with Wi-Fi. Source: Associated Press

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR FIELD GUIDE

If you’d like your own bullshit alarm tuned a little more finely, The Bullshit Detector is free to paid Off Script subscribers or available for $4.95 through the Tom Hicks Media store. It’s built for the political claim that sounds airtight until somebody commits the increasingly radical act of checking it. Think of it as something to keep handy whenever your television starts yelling at you.

ACROSS TOM HICKS MEDIA

Lotus Purrspective: The world makes considerably more sense when it’s being judged from a windowsill by a tuxedo cat who has very little patience for human nonsense. Lotus offers daily observations on our habits, priorities, and inexplicable need to complicate perfectly simple things. She’d probably tell you she’s the only member of Tom Hicks Media who actually has her shit together.

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The Backlot Ghost: Saturday’s edition heads back into the dark corners of classic movies, where the stories behind the camera are occasionally stranger than anything somebody bothered putting in the script. It’s movie history after the lights go out and the respectable people have gone home. Every movie leaves something behind.

Rabbit Ears Classic TV: Classic television gets treated like it actually mattered, because it did. Rabbit Ears digs into the shows, moments, performances, and wonderfully strange pieces of television history that stayed with us long after the antennas disappeared. If it’s still rattling around in your head forty years later, there’s probably a reason.

Panic Room Sports: Football coverage without the screaming panel show and premature panic attack. Panic Room Sports checks the tape first, then decides whether everybody needs to calm the hell down or start boarding up the windows. Everyone reacts. We’ll check the tape first.

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

Milo Yiannopoulos spent years demanding harsher immigration enforcement and is now caught inside the system he championed. The irony’s almost too perfect, but the larger question matters more. Does what happened to Milo change how you see the policy, or only how you see Milo?

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Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14420 Thursday, directing the Interior Department and U.S. Board on Geographic Names to replace “Lake Ontario” with “Lake America” throughout federal maps, contracts, documents and communications. He declared the change effective immediately, although the order gives Interior 30 days to update the federal geographic database. Canada, inconveniently, remains a sovereign country and cannot be ordered by an American president to participate in his latest arts-and-crafts project.

And this is where the thing achieves almost operatic levels of stupid. Roughly 52 percent of Lake Ontario’s surface lies in Canada, so Trump’s executive order counters with an argument apparently developed by an eight-year-old fighting over the swimming pool: the deepest parts are on the American side; therefore the United States “claims most of the Lake’s volume.” We have apparently entered the age of volumetric nationalism. Canada may have more of the top, but goddammit, America has the deep end.

The EPA, perhaps unaware that hydrographic patriotism was about to become federal policy, describes Lake Ontario much more conventionally. It is a Great Lake that straddles the Canada-U.S. border, covers about 7,340 square miles and reaches a maximum depth of roughly 802 feet. None of those measurements appear to confer naming rights upon whichever country happens to own the water closest to the fish with the worst sunburn.

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Canada Has Declined to Play Along

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded with roughly the amount of reverence the occasion deserved. He said Canadians would continue calling it Lake Ontario and pointed out that the name has been used for centuries, predating both Canadian Confederation and the American Declaration of Independence. The name itself has Indigenous roots, derived from a Huron/Wendat term commonly translated as “lake of shining waters.”

Trump, meanwhile, was asked what message the order was intended to send Canada. “No message,” he said. He then immediately started complaining about Canada, saying it had been ripping off the United States on trade and defense, which is a little like spray-painting SCREW YOU, DAVE across Dave’s garage and telling the cops there’s no particular message involved.

Then Trump began thinking bigger. “We have a Gulf, and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean,” he said, suggesting that either the Atlantic or Pacific might be next in the presidential label maker. At this rate, Mount Everest should start retaining counsel.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names can standardize what the federal government calls geographic features, so Trump can indeed force federal agencies to use his preferred terminology. He cannot make Canada, foreign governments, international organizations or private mapmakers follow him. The Board’s own ordinary guidance says name changes are generally discouraged unless there is a compelling reason and evidence of support, which seems quaint now that “the president is irritated with Ottawa” apparently qualifies as cartography.

This Would Be Funnier If It Were Only Stupid

The tempting response is to laugh at all of this, and believe me, I have no intention of resisting temptation completely. An 80-year-old president using an executive order to rename a lake while hinting that an ocean could be next deserves ridicule. Public officials who insist on behaving ridiculously should not receive the courtesy of having their ridiculous behavior translated into solemn Washington language.

But underneath the comedy is something considerably uglier.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The United States imposed new 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods after trade talks collapsed, and Canada responded with retaliatory tariffs covering approximately the same value of American imports. Additional U.S. tariffs on Canadian automobiles and parts are scheduled for January, turning a dispute between two deeply integrated economies into a widening economic fight.

Trump said Wednesday that America doesn’t really need anything Canada has. The actual economy apparently missed the memo. The two countries exchanged roughly $872 billion in goods and services last year; Canada sends about four million barrels of crude oil per day to the United States, and it is a major source of American aluminum, potash, auto parts and imported electricity.

This is what makes the lake stunt more than harmless presidential trolling. Trade disputes between nations can affect factories, farms, energy supplies, grocery bills, transportation networks and hundreds of thousands of jobs on both sides of the border. When you’re handling something that complicated, deliberately humiliating the other country may feel terrific for fifteen minutes and accomplish absolutely fuck-all at the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, American consumers aren’t exactly sitting around wondering when Washington will finally fix the Lake Ontario naming crisis. Consumer confidence fell in August to its lowest point in seven months, with Americans becoming more pessimistic about future business conditions and employment. Inflation expectations also rose, while the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure remained well above its target in July.

Nobody standing in a grocery checkout line has ever looked at the total, sighed and said, “Jesus Christ, thank God somebody finally renamed that lake.”

THE RECORD

Lake Ontario has been Lake Ontario for centuries. Its name comes from Indigenous language, and the lake itself is physically shared by the United States and Canada. The Trump administration can change the terminology used by American federal agencies, but an executive order does not grant Washington ownership of Canadian water or give the president power to dictate what another country calls a shared geographic feature.

The renaming came during a rapidly worsening trade dispute with Canada, even though Trump said the order was sending Canada “no message.” He has also suggested renaming an ocean next, which makes it difficult to pretend this is some urgent act of geographic housekeeping. It is political theater carried out with the machinery of the federal government.

And that, more than “Lake America,” is the part worth remembering. Executive orders are supposed to direct the operation of the federal government. When presidential authority becomes another prop in somebody’s never-ending personal branding campaign, the joke stops being entirely funny.

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

“MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” IN IRAN

BULLSHIT RULING: Mission apparently still in progress.

Trump revived one of the most cursed phrases in modern presidential history this week, declaring “Mission Accomplished” while the conflict with Iran continues and the United States is still dealing with its military and economic consequences. Current reporting says the war has contributed to serious pressure on U.S. missile inventories, including concerns about Patriot supplies available to European allies. Victory declarations work better when everybody has actually stopped fighting.

NOTHING POLITICAL ABOUT THE KID ROCK HELICOPTER MESS

BULLSHIT RULING: Somebody needs to explain one hell of a coincidence.

The Washington Post reports that shortly before Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George was fired, he was advised to halt an investigation into an unauthorized Apache helicopter flyby near Kid Rock’s Tennessee home. George reportedly wanted the normal review to continue; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later killed the investigation himself and announced, “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, Patriots.” The reporting does not prove George was fired because of the dispute, but pretending the sequence raises no legitimate questions is bullshit.

DON JR.’S INVESTMENT FIRM IS JUST AN ORDINARY SUCCESS STORY

BULLSHIT RULING: “Nothing to see here” is not an acceptable answer.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats opened an investigation Thursday into 1789 Capital, the venture firm Donald Trump Jr. joined four days after the 2024 election. According to the committee, the firm grew from about $150 million under management before Trump Jr. joined to more than $3 billion, while companies in its portfolio later received significant federal contracts and funding. That does not prove corruption, and an investigation should not be confused with a conviction, but those numbers are plenty of reason to demand records instead of accepting a shrug.

PUTTING TRUMP’S NAME ON THE KENNEDY CENTER ISN’T REALLY RENAMING IT

BULLSHIT RULING: Washington has discovered the world’s longest footnote.

After a federal judge ruled that Congress controls the name of the Kennedy Center, the government is now defending proposed signage reading “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump.” Justice Department lawyers argue that this technically isn’t renaming the building. Perhaps not, but when your workaround requires letters large enough to make the dead president share the marquee, the distinction is doing an awful lot of work.

The Bullshit Detector goes deeper into the tricks, distortions, and rhetorical garbage that make bad information sound convincing. It’s free to Off Script subscribers, or available separately for $4.95 through the Tom Hicks Media Store.

Elsewhere at Tom Hicks Media

Tom’s Number Ones

One date, six charts, and the songs that were actually sitting at No. 1. Then we go beyond the rankings with the stories, videos, and cultural debris that made that week sound the way it did.

Lotus Purrspective

Lotus continues studying human behavior from a safe distance and reaching conclusions humans would probably prefer she kept to herself. She rarely does.

Panic Room Sports

Football coverage for people who would rather check the tape before joining the screaming. Fantasy, NFL reality checks and the occasional reminder that preseason certainty ages like gas-station sushi. If you play fantasy football, you’ll want to get our free draft guide in today’s issue.

Rabbit Ears Classic TV

Classic television without pretending everything old was automatically great. The shows, people, strange decisions, and moments that survived long enough to become part of the furniture.

The Backlot Ghost

Classic movies after the lights go down. Hollywood history, forgotten stories and the things still rattling around the studio long after everybody thought the picture was finished.

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One Question Before You Go

At what point does something like “Lake America” stop being harmless trolling and start looking like a president using the powers of his office to settle personal grudges?

I’m genuinely interested in where you draw that line.

If you value independent reporting that checks the record, calls bullshit when the evidence earns it, and occasionally points out when the president of the United States is fighting with a body of water, consider subscribing or sharing Off Script with somebody who might enjoy it.

Because tomorrow there will be another story, and apparently, we should keep an eye on the Atlantic.

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EDITORIAL NOTE

This isn’t an accusation that every retailer has secretly assigned you a personal price. The evidence doesn’t support that, and I’m not going to scare the shit out of you just because it makes a better headline. What the evidence does show is that companies now have the technology to use personal information in pricing decisions, and regulators are increasingly asking what happens when the price of something depends partly on who’s looking at it. FTC

We’ve spent years worrying about what companies know about us. We may need to start asking what that knowledge is worth at the checkout.

I’m retired. I pay attention to what things cost because I fucking have to.

That doesn’t make me cheap, and it doesn’t make me unusual. I’ve got a finite amount of money coming in, so I notice when groceries creep up again or when something I bought six months ago suddenly costs five dollars more. There are millions of retirees, working families, and people trying to stretch a paycheck who know exactly what I mean.

I shop around. I’ll leave something sitting in an online cart if I think the price is too high, and I’ll come back later to see whether it dropped. I’ve always thought of that as using the internet the way it was supposed to be used.

Then I started looking at personalized pricing.

And now I’m wondering whether some of those same habits that help me save money can also help a company figure out exactly how much money it can get out of me.

WHEN THE PRICE TAG STARTS STUDYING YOU

The Federal Trade Commission calls the practice personalized pricing when personal data is used to set a price according to what a business thinks an individual consumer will pay. That can include estimates about whether somebody is likely to comparison-shop instead of simply swallowing the number on the screen. The agency is now considering an enforcement policy aimed at undisclosed or deceptive uses of the practice. FTC

Think about how fundamentally weird that is.

For most of my life, the store decided what something cost. Maybe the price changed tomorrow, maybe another store sold it cheaper, and maybe there was a sale next week that made me wish I’d waited. The price was attached to the thing.

Personalized pricing creates the possibility that part of the price is attached to me. The FTC’s proposed policy specifically addresses the use of personal data to estimate what an individual consumer is willing to pay or whether that consumer is likely to shop around. That’s a very different bargain. FTC

If an airline raises fares because half the seats disappeared overnight, I understand what happened even if I don’t like it. If a hotel charges more during a convention because every room in town is filling up, that’s supply and demand doing what supply and demand does. I may swear at the screen, but at least I know the game I’m playing.

The game gets considerably shadier if my browsing history, shopping behavior or other information about me helps determine the number I’m shown.

The FTC’s earlier surveillance-pricing study found that intermediaries working with retailers can use information including precise location, browsing patterns and shopping history. The agency also found that behavior as specific as mouse movements and products left behind in an online cart can be tracked and used by retailers to tailor consumer pricing. That study examined documents from companies including Mastercard, Accenture, McKinsey, PROS, Bloomreach and Revionics. FTC

That abandoned cart part landed a little differently for me.

I abandon carts because sometimes the responsible answer is, “Nope, not today.” Maybe I’m hoping the price drops or I’ve decided I can live without whatever shiny object caught my eye. That’s budgeting.

But from the other side of the screen, it’s also data.

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BEING CAREFUL WITH MONEY LEAVES CLUES

This is the part of the story I think gets lost when personalized pricing is discussed as some abstract technology issue.

People who have to watch their money behave differently from people who don’t. We check prices more carefully, wait longer, and sometimes come back to the same product several times before deciding whether we can justify buying it. Those are sensible habits when ten or twenty dollars actually matters.

They’re also clues.

A sufficiently sophisticated system doesn’t have to know that I’m sitting here thinking, Can I really afford this right now? It only has to recognize patterns in what I do and make predictions from them. That’s exactly why the FTC’s proposed policy specifically mentions estimates of a consumer’s willingness to pay and likelihood of comparison-shopping. FTC

That’s where my tolerance for clever technology begins to run out.

If an algorithm helps a store figure out which product I might like, fine. Recommend the damn toaster. If the same machinery starts working out how much extra Tom might grudgingly pay because he’s returned to the page four times, we’re getting into territory where I’d like somebody to explain the rules before reaching into my wallet.

And people on fixed incomes have more at stake than some Silicon Valley discussion about “price optimization” makes it sound.

An extra dollar on something you buy once a year is irritating. A few extra dollars scattered across groceries and household necessities can become real money when it happens week after week. Anybody who’s ever stood in a grocery aisle doing mental arithmetic already understands that without needing an algorithm to explain it.

WE ALREADY KNOW DIFFERENT PEOPLE CAN SEE DIFFERENT PRICES

A Consumer Reports investigation last year provides a useful example, with one very important distinction.

Researchers working with Groundwork Collaborative and More Perfect Union recruited 437 shoppers for simultaneous Instacart tests across four cities. They found that 74 percent of the grocery items examined appeared at multiple price points, with identical items at the same store and time sometimes differing substantially from one shopper to another. The largest difference recorded for an identical item was 23 percent. Consumer Reports research data

That sounds exactly like surveillance pricing until you look more carefully, which is why looking more carefully matters.

Instacart said the tests didn’t use personal, demographic or individual behavioral information to determine which prices shoppers received. The company said shoppers were randomly assigned to testing groups and that retailers controlled the pricing experiments. Instacart subsequently ended its item-price testing program after the Consumer Reports investigation. Consumer Reports

So I’m not calling the Instacart experiment surveillance pricing.

What it demonstrates is something almost as important for this discussion: two people can sit down at the same time, shop the same store for the same shit, and see different numbers without either one having any obvious way of knowing that’s happening. Consumer Reports’ testing documented as many as five different prices for the exact same grocery item in the same store at the same time. Consumer Reports research data

That transparency problem gets considerably uglier if personal information ever becomes part of determining who gets which number.

If I’m being charged a different price because I’m me, I want to fucking know it.

STATES ARE STARTING TO DRAW LINES

New York decided disclosure was the minimum.

A law that took effect November 10, 2025, requires covered businesses using personal data to set algorithmic prices to prominently disclose that fact near the price. The mandated language is about as subtle as a brick through a window: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” Businesses can face penalties for violations. New York Attorney General

I like that.

You want to charge me a Tom Price? Fine. Put a big sign next to it telling me exactly what you’re doing and give me the opportunity to take my money somewhere else.

New Jersey went further in July. Its Fair Price Protection Act prohibits retailers from using shoppers’ personal data to set individualized prices for groceries and other necessities based on what an algorithm predicts somebody is willing or able to pay. The law specifically includes information such as online activity, location and purchasing history, while leaving loyalty programs and discounts intact. State of New Jersey

California is looking at the issue through privacy law.

The state attorney general launched an investigative sweep in January focused on businesses using personal information to set targeted, individualized prices. The attorney general’s office said those practices can trigger obligations under the California Consumer Privacy Act and may violate the law when data is used in ways consumers wouldn’t reasonably expect. California Attorney General

That’s enough activity in enough different places to tell me this isn’t a hypothetical problem somebody dreamed up after smoking too much weed at an AI conference.

Government officials are looking at it because the capability exists.

I DON’T WANT A “TOM PRICE”

Businesses have been trying to make money from me for seventy years, and I’m strangely at peace with that.

I’m trying to keep as much of mine as possible. They want some of it. Somewhere between those two positions sits most of American commerce.

What changes the deal is when one side knows vastly more about the other than the other realizes.

A retailer may have access to information about what I looked at, what I bought before, my location, and whether I left something sitting in a cart. The FTC’s surveillance-pricing study found that pricing intermediaries can draw on consumer characteristics, behaviors, and shopping patterns to help retailers target prices and promotions. I know the store wants my money. FTC

I’m considerably less comfortable with the store conducting a psychological assessment first.

There’s also something perverse about a system that could make being careful with money work against the person trying to be careful.

The guy with unlimited disposable income doesn’t need to spend forty minutes hunting for the cheapest version of something. The retiree, single parent or family watching every paycheck is much more likely to comparison-shop and hesitate over a purchase. Those behaviors can produce exactly the sort of information sophisticated pricing systems are designed to analyze.

So the people working hardest to find the best price could be helping teach the machine how badly they want one.

That’s fucked up.

THE RECORD

Personalized pricing is real, although its use varies and the evidence doesn’t support claims that every retailer is doing it. The FTC defines the practice as using personal data to set prices according to what a company believes an individual consumer will pay, and its market study documented the breadth of consumer information available to pricing intermediaries. FTC

It also isn’t the same thing as ordinary dynamic pricing. Prices can change because of supply, demand, or other market conditions without anybody using a shopper’s personal information. The privacy issue appears when information about the individual becomes part of determining or tailoring the price or offer. FTC

The FTC isn’t proposing a nationwide ban on personalized pricing. The commission explicitly says Congress hasn’t given it authority to prohibit the practice in every circumstance, so its current proposal focuses on deceptive or unfair practices that may violate laws the agency already enforces. FTC proposed policy

And that seems like an awfully low bar to me.

If you’re using what you know about me to decide what I should pay, tell me.

Then let me decide whether you’ll ever see another fucking dime.

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

There’s always more bullshit than there is room to print it. Here are four fresh ones making the rounds.

ROY COOPER’S PRISON RELEASES LED TO A SOUTH CAROLINA MURDER

Bullshit: False.

Why: A Republican super PAC ad attacking Democratic Senate candidate Roy Cooper strongly implies that a man accused of murdering 22-year-old Logan Federico was among prisoners released while Cooper was governor of North Carolina. The accused man was released from prison in South Carolina, not North Carolina, and Cooper had nothing to do with that decision. There are legitimate questions surrounding the suspect’s criminal history, but blaming a governor in another state for releasing him requires leaving out the one fact that destroys the entire argument. FactCheck.org

NANCY MACE LOST HER SHIT ON CAMERA

Bullshit: Fake video.

Why: A viral clip appears to show Republican Rep. Nancy Mace dancing, grimacing, and generally behaving like somebody replaced her coffee with something considerably stronger. The original video was posted by comedian Sydney Smith, and the circulating version was doctored to add Mace’s face and arm tattoos. You can dislike Nancy Mace for any number of things she’s actually done, but manufacturing new ones is still bullshit. Lead Stories

HAKEEM JEFFRIES WAS PHOTOGRAPHED HAVING A MEAL WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN

Bullshit: Fake image.

Why: An image circulating online appears to show House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries sitting at a table with Jeffrey Epstein. Lead Stories found no evidence that Jeffries ever met or ate with Epstein, and two image-analysis systems identified the picture as likely synthetic or AI-generated. We’ve reached the point where seeing a photograph isn’t proof that the photographed event ever fucking happened, which ought to bother everybody regardless of politics. Lead Stories

TRUMP POSTED A PICTURE OF HIMSELF WALKING ON WATER

Bullshit: He didn’t.

Why: A circulating image showed Donald Trump walking across water carrying a Bible beneath the words “Pastor. President. Protector.” Social-media users claimed Trump himself had posted it to Truth Social, but a review of his account and archived posts found no such post. The image instead originated from a Trump-friendly Facebook account, which means there’s no need to assign him bullshit he didn’t actually post when the internet provides plenty of real material every day. Lead Stories

WANT YOUR OWN BULLSHIT DETECTOR?

The Bullshit Detector guide is for those moments when a headline, political claim, viral post, or suspiciously perfect statistic makes something in the back of your brain say, Hang on a fucking minute. It walks through the same basic habits I use here to check where a claim came from and whether the evidence actually says what somebody insists it says.

Off Script subscribers get the Bullshit Detector free. Everyone else can pick it up for $4.95 in the Tom Hicks Media Store.

AROUND TOM HICKS MEDIA

Tom’s Number Ones goes back through the charts every morning to find out what America was actually listening to on this date in another year. The records may be old, but some of the surprises have aged considerably better than we have.

Lotus Purrspective continues one tuxedo cat’s daily investigation into the deeply questionable behavior of the humans she’s been forced to supervise. Lotus remains confident that most of our problems could be solved if we’d listen to the cat the first time.

Rabbit Ears Classic TV is back today with another trip into the television that turned ordinary evenings in front of the set into memories people carried for decades. Some shows entertained us, while a handful managed to become part of the furniture in our heads. Check out today’s issue.

Panic Room Sports is getting ready for the point in football season when actual evidence begins replacing preseason bullshit. That won’t stop everybody from panicking, which is fortunate because we’ve built an entire publication around checking whether they should.

The Backlot Ghost walks through classic Hollywood looking for what stayed behind after everybody else went home. The movies are familiar, but some of the stories lurking behind them decidedly aren’t.

Blind Spot returns Sunday inside Off Script with the story that deserves more room than a daily article can give it. That’s where we take the extra time, follow the record, and find out what got missed while everybody was chasing the same headline.

BUY ME A CUP OF TEA

Off Script is free to read, and I’d like to keep as much of it that way as possible. If this morning’s piece made you look at that innocent little price on your screen differently, you can help support the reporting and research that goes into doing this every day.

Buy me a cup of tea, and I’ll keep looking under rocks.

ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

If you discovered a company had charged you more because an algorithm decided you personally would probably pay it, would you ever shop there again?

Tell me below. I have a feeling people are going to have some fairly strong opinions about this one.

#OffScript #PersonalizedPricing #SurveillancePricing #ConsumerProtection #Privacy #CostOfLiving

Editorial Note

Trade wars are usually sold with charts, patriotic slogans, and promises that somebody somewhere is finally going to stop screwing America. This one has something extra: an electoral map. Canada has decided that if Donald Trump wants an economic fight, it might as well make sure the people defending him feel some of the punches.

Donald Trump spent years selling tariffs as the economic equivalent of a magic trick. Put a tax on foreign goods, foreigners supposedly pay it, American factories roar back to life, and the Treasury fills up without anybody at home getting a bill. The trouble with magic tricks is that they become a lot less impressive once somebody explains where the rabbit was hiding.

Canada appears to have found the rabbit.

On Tuesday, the Canadian government announced retaliatory tariffs covering about $20 billion in annual U.S. imports, matching Trump’s newest tariffs on Canadian goods dollar for dollar. The Canadian duties will range from 15% to 50%, cover roughly 700 American products, and begin September 8. Steel, aluminum, furniture, clothing, cheese, appliances, seafood, electronics, tools, machinery, paper products, and plenty more are headed into the crossfire. (reuters.com)

That alone would be a major economic story. Then Canadian Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the quiet part out loud.

Canada chose some of those products specifically because of where in the United States they are made. Joly said Ottawa was being “wise and strategic” by selecting goods that would put political pressure on particular states before Americans vote in the November 3 midterm elections. That changes the story from ordinary tariff retaliation into something considerably more interesting. (reuters.com)

Canada isn’t merely shooting back.

It is aiming.

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THEY KNOW WHERE THE VOTES ARE

Maine has lobsters, blueberries and lumber moving through a deeply integrated Canadian market. Michigan sends roughly a third of its exports north of the border. Ohio, Alaska and Iowa also have important industries tied to Canadian trade, and several happen to be home to Senate races that could help decide who controls Congress next year. (apnews.com)

Republican Sen. Susan Collins isn’t pretending the danger is theoretical. “Imposing new tariffs on Canada is a mistake,” she said Monday while campaigning in Maine, warning that businesses and consumers in her state could pay for the confrontation. Collins is one of the Republican incumbents Democrats would dearly love to knock off in November. (apnews.com)

That’s the part Trump apparently forgot when he decided to turn one of America’s largest trading relationships into another loyalty test. You can declare that Canada is getting what it deserves, but a lobster boat in Maine doesn’t become economically invincible because somebody typed AMERICA FIRST in capital letters. Eventually somebody has to sell the damn lobster.

And Canada knows exactly which somebody.

TRUMP’S VERSION OF THE STORY

The White House says the 50% U.S. tariffs are justified by Canada’s treatment of American products. Its July 20 fact sheet accused Canada of discriminating against U.S. commerce, cited restrictions involving American vehicles and alcoholic beverages, and said the new tariffs would “level the playing field” for American exporters. Unlike many earlier tariff actions, these duties also apply to covered products that otherwise qualify under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. (whitehouse.gov)

That’s the administration’s argument, and it deserves to be stated accurately. Countries absolutely fight over tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and market access, and Canada is hardly some innocent woodland creature that wandered into Washington carrying maple syrup. There are legitimate trade disputes between the two countries.

What Trump keeps skipping is the second half of the equation.

A tariff is a tax collected when goods enter the country. U.S. Customs and Border Protection administers those duties on imports, which means the cost enters the American side of the transaction before Canada ever sees a cash register. Businesses can absorb that cost, negotiate it away, change suppliers, cut somewhere else or pass some of it along to customers, but there is no little Canadian government booth at the border writing Donald Trump a check. (help.cbp.gov)

Then comes retaliation.

American companies suddenly discover that their products cost more in Canada. Canadian buyers look for alternatives. Farmers, manufacturers and exporters who had nothing to do with the original dispute get drafted into somebody else’s economic war.

Now Ottawa has added another twist: it is choosing some of those American casualties with November in mind.

THE BEAUTIFUL TRADE WAR MEETS POLITICS

Trump’s latest tariffs affect roughly 5% of Canadian exports to the United States, so this is not an economic blockade. The damage is concentrated instead, which may make it politically more potent because individual industries can get hammered while the national numbers still look manageable. Reuters reported that wood-product businesses, including kitchen-cabinet makers, are among those particularly exposed on the Canadian side. (reuters.com)

Canada is preparing for pain too. Ottawa announced a C$7.5 billion support package for affected businesses and workers, including interest-free loans for some companies. That tells you nobody involved believes tariffs are some painless machine that prints prosperity. (reuters.com)

And yet the American political sales pitch keeps coming back to the same idea: tariffs make the other guy pay.

If that were really how this worked, Canada wouldn’t bother targeting Maine.

It wouldn’t care about Michigan.

And Mélanie Joly wouldn’t be openly talking about putting political pressure on American states before the midterms.

You don’t aim at somebody’s voters unless you think those voters might feel something.

THEN TRUMP THREATENED THE CARS

Trump isn’t backing away. He has threatened to raise tariffs on Canadian automobiles, auto parts and steel to 50% in 2027, declaring on social media that “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Meanwhile, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has said the administration does not expect a huge impact from the current dispute. (apnews.com)

Those two messages don’t sit comfortably together. Either Canada is economically unimportant enough that America won’t notice the fight, or Canadian trade is dangerous enough to require another round of 50% tariffs. Trying to argue both is how you wind up punching yourself in the face while announcing that the other guy looks terrible.

The auto threat is particularly reckless because the North American automobile industry isn’t neatly divided by a border. Parts and components can cross between the United States and Canada during production, and the economies have spent decades building supply chains around that integration. A tariff doesn’t consult a campaign speech before it lands on an invoice.

This is where the entire tariff fantasy finally runs into arithmetic.

CANADA’S REAL WEAPON

Canada’s most effective response may turn out not to be the tariff rate itself. It may be the decision to translate a giant international trade dispute into hundreds of smaller local stories.

A Maine fisherman doesn’t have to understand Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. He only has to know that one of his best markets suddenly became harder to sell into. An Ohio manufacturer doesn’t need to study the finer points of trade negotiations if orders soften and somebody starts asking whether overtime is still available.

That’s how national policy becomes local politics.

Trump has built much of his economic appeal around the idea that he is willing to do things other presidents were too timid to do. Sometimes disruption is necessary. But disruption isn’t a policy by itself, and causing economic pain becomes a much tougher sell when another government figures out exactly which congressional districts should receive it.

Canada figured it out.

Donald Trump wanted a trade war.

Canada brought an electoral map.

THE RECORD

• July 20: The White House announced additional 50% tariffs on certain Canadian goods under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, including some products that qualify under USMCA. (whitehouse.gov)

• August 22: The latest U.S. tariffs took effect after negotiations between Washington and Ottawa collapsed. They cover roughly $20 billion in Canadian imports. (reuters.com)

• August 25: Canada announced dollar-for-dollar retaliation on about $20 billion in U.S. goods, with rates of 15%, 25% and 50% across roughly 700 products. (reuters.com)

• September 8: Canada’s counter-tariffs are scheduled to take effect. (reuters.com)

• November 3: Americans vote in the midterm elections, and Canadian officials have acknowledged that their tariff strategy is partly designed to apply political pressure in targeted U.S. states before that vote. (reuters.com)

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

1. TIPPED WORKERS ARE SAVING $10,000 BECAUSE OF “NO TAX ON TIPS”

Bullshit: Nevada tipped workers are saving an average of $10,000 on their taxes because of Trump’s “no tax on tips” policy, while Georgia workers are saving more than $7,000.

Why: There is no federal data supporting those figures, and Trump appears to be confusing the size of a tax deduction with the amount of taxes actually saved. A $10,000 deduction for someone in the 12% bracket would save about $1,200 in federal income tax, not $10,000, and payroll taxes on tips still apply. The policy may save some workers money, but the numbers Trump is selling bear very little resemblance to what the tax code actually does. (factcheck.org)

2. SHERROD BROWN’S IMMIGRATION VOTES LED TO A DEADLY OHIO CRASH

Bullshit: Former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown’s immigration votes helped create the circumstances that led to an April interstate crash in which an immigrant was charged with vehicular homicide.

Why: There is no evidence connecting Brown’s votes to the suspect or showing that anything Brown did enabled the crash. The ad takes a real tragedy and manufactures a political chain of responsibility that the available evidence does not support. Immigration policy is fair game in a Senate campaign. Turning a fatal crash into campaign ammunition by inventing causation is bullshit. (factcheck.org)

3. POLITICS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ENERGY GRANT CANCELLATIONS

Bullshit: Politics played no role in the Energy Department’s cancellation of more than 280 federal energy grants.

Why: The department’s own lawyers acknowledged that the awards were selected for cancellation because the recipients were located in Democratic-voting states. You can argue all day about whether those grants should have existed in the first place. What you cannot honestly argue is that politics had nothing to do with which ones were killed when the government’s own filing says otherwise. (factcheck.org)

AROUND TOM HICKS MEDIA

Tom’s Number Ones

Every morning starts somewhere on the charts. Tom’s Number Ones goes back to another year, checks what was actually sitting at No. 1, and lets the music handle the time travel.

Lotus Purrspective

Lotus continues documenting the strange habits of humans from the safest possible location: somewhere above us, judging quietly. New observations from the cat arrive daily.

Panic Room Sports

Football season is getting close enough that every practice report is becoming either a prophecy or a nervous breakdown. Panic Room Sports sorts through the NFL and fantasy noise before anybody trades away half the roster because somebody limped once.

Rabbit Ears TV

Rabbit Ears TV returns Thursday with another trip into classic television, the people who made it, and the stories hiding behind shows we thought we already knew.

The Backlot Ghost

A new Backlot Ghost arrives today. Classic Hollywood always looks glamorous from the front of the theater. We prefer checking what was left behind after everybody went home.

Blind Spot

Sunday’s Blind Spot goes deeper into the story the daily news cycle was too busy, too distracted, or too comfortable to finish. It’s part of Off Script with Tom Hicks, built for the stories that need more than a headline and six minutes of outrage.

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Canada is deliberately targeting products from politically important U.S. states to make Trump’s trade war hurt before the midterms. Smart retaliation, dirty politics, or exactly what Trump should have expected?

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There was a time when buying hamburger didn’t require investigative journalism.

You went to the store, stared at the price for a few seconds, wondered when ground beef became a luxury item, and tossed it in the cart. Maybe you checked whether it was 80/20 or 90/10. Nobody expected you to conduct an international trade investigation before making meatloaf.

Apparently those days are over.

President Trump says the United States is preparing to open the door to as much as 300,000 metric tons of imported product for ground beef over 90 days, at lower tariffs. He says there is a commitment to sell that beef at 25% below current market prices.

Then a reporter asked Trump himself which countries were involved.

“I don’t want to say which countries,” he replied. There are “a few countries,” he added, and they’ll be sending the “highest quality beef.”

That would be a perfectly reasonable answer if he were discussing submarine locations.

He’s discussing hamburger.

First, We Really Are Running Out of Cattle

The beef shortage is not some manufactured political crisis. USDA counted 86.2 million cattle and calves on American farms on January 1, 2026, with just 27.6 million beef cows, down another 1% from the previous year. The national cattle inventory is now at its lowest level in roughly 75 years.

July didn’t suddenly fix it. USDA’s midyear count found 28.5 million beef cows, still 1% below the previous July, with the projected calf crop down 2%. A cattle herd cannot be rebuilt because somebody in Washington announces that it would be politically convenient for steaks to cost less by Labor Day.

Years of drought burned up grazing land and drove feed costs higher. Ranchers liquidated animals because keeping them became too expensive, imports of Mexican cattle were disrupted by the New World screwworm threat, and meatpackers have been closing plants because the available cattle are so expensive.

Consumers have been getting the bill.

In July, beef and veal prices were 9.4% higher than a year earlier. Ground beef was up 9%, steaks 9.6%, and roasts a lovely 13.5%. Overall food prices were up 3%.

So yes, beef is expensive.

The question is whether the cure is going to make the disease worse.

We’re Also Losing the People Who Raise It

This is the part of the story that bothers me more than the price of hamburger.

The 2017 Census of Agriculture counted 729,046 American farms with beef cows. By the 2022 census, there were 622,162. That means the country lost 106,884 beef-cow operations in five years, a decline of 14.7%.

Spread across that five-year census period, that works out to roughly 59 beef-cow operations disappearing every day.

To be precise, that does not mean USDA has somebody sitting in an office clicking a counter every time another ranch closes in 2026. It is the average decline between the two most recent complete agricultural censuses. But if your comforting rebuttal is that America didn’t literally lose exactly 59 ranches every Tuesday, I think you may be missing the larger problem.

Look at every operation with cattle and calves, and it gets uglier. America went from 882,692 cattle operations in 2017 to 732,123 in 2022. That’s more than 150,000 operations gone in five years.

Meanwhile, the cattle herd kept shrinking.

That is how you end up where we are now. We spent years watching producers disappear, animals disappear, and the domestic supply tighten, and now everybody is standing in the supermarket acting stunned that hamburger costs too much.

We didn’t wake up one morning and discover that somebody stole the cows.

We watched them leave.

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And Here Comes the Emergency Beef

Trump’s answer is to temporarily expand the amount of imported ground-beef product that can enter the country at lower tariff rates by 300,000 metric tons over 90 days. The White House says an executive order is coming, and Trump says exporters have agreed to sell the beef 25% below current market prices.

There are a few problems.

Economists and commodity traders have questioned whether the additional amount is large enough compared with total American beef consumption to make much difference at the grocery store. Cattle futures, on the other hand, didn’t find it insignificant at all. They dropped sharply after the announcement.

And American ranchers immediately started yelling.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association warned that flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market foreign beef could discourage producers from rebuilding the American herd. The United States Cattlemen’s Association was even less diplomatic:

“You don’t put America first by putting U.S. cattle producers last.”

This is where the policy begins eating its own tail.

The United States needs ranchers to retain breeding animals, grow their herds and accept the financial risk of producing more cattle. That takes time. It also requires some confidence that Washington isn’t going to pull the rug out from under them by opening the import spigot whenever consumers get angry about supermarket prices.

You cannot tell American cattle producers, “Please grow more beef,” while simultaneously telling foreign producers, “Come on in, we need cheaper beef.”

Well, obviously you can.

We’re watching it happen.

Where Is It Coming From?

This should be the easiest part of the story.

The president announces hundreds of thousands of tons of imported food. Somebody asks which countries are supplying it. The president names the countries.

End of mystery.

Instead, Trump said he didn’t want to say. The White House has also declined to publicly identify the suppliers or explain how the promised discount would be arranged.

Why?

We don’t know.

And I’m not interested in filling that hole with a conspiracy theory just because the administration has conveniently dug one.

Maybe these are perfectly ordinary suppliers already approved to ship beef into the United States. Maybe every pound will pass every required inspection and arrive wrapped in a little patriotic bow. Maybe there is an entirely innocent explanation for withholding information that should be boring enough to appear in the third paragraph of a USDA press release.

Then give us the boring explanation.

Because “Trust me, it’s the highest quality” is not traceability.

It’s something a guy says while selling speakers out of the back of a van.

Now We Get to Argentina

Argentina keeps showing up around the edges of this story for very good reasons.

Earlier this year, the United States granted Argentina an additional 80,000 metric tons of low-tariff access for boneless lean beef used largely in processing. USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service subsequently reported that Argentine exporters were prioritizing the American market because prices were higher here, tariffs were lower, and shipping times were shorter.

That doesn’t make Argentina guilty of anything.

It makes Argentina relevant.

Trump has already dramatically expanded Argentine access to the American beef market. Argentine exporters have an economic incentive to send more beef here. Now Trump announces another enormous temporary import opening involving several countries he declines to identify.

Asking whether Argentina is one of those countries is not a conspiracy theory.

It is what reporters are supposed to ask when the president won’t answer a painfully simple question.

And Yes, China Really Did Reject Argentine Beef

This is where we need to keep both feet on the ground, because the internet loves nothing more than finding two suspicious facts and immediately marrying them.

In March, Chinese authorities suspended imports from the Argentine processor ArreBeef after reporting the detection of chloramphenicol, an antibiotic prohibited in food animals, in a 22-ton shipment of beef. Argentina’s government subsequently investigated 12 cattle operations connected to the shipment.

According to Argentina’s official response to lawmakers, investigators found no chloramphenicol products, no records showing its use, and no evidence during those inspections that the farms had used the prohibited drug. Argentina challenged the finding, while China’s broader beef trade with Argentina remained open and operational.

That is the story.

It is not evidence that China rejected the entire Argentine beef supply. It is not evidence that Trump bought China’s rejected meat. It is not evidence that the beef headed to your supermarket came from that plant, that shipment or even Argentina.

But once again, the government could make a lot of wild speculation disappear very quickly.

Tell people where the 300,000 metric tons are coming from.

There’s a radical idea.

Then the Horses Walk Into the Story

As if the beef story needed help becoming unsettling, the federal government is simultaneously dealing with another livestock controversy where nobody seems terribly interested in answering a basic question about where the animals went.

A New York Times investigation found that federal sales of wild horses surged in 2025. BLM’s own figures show it sold 3,718 wild horses and burros, up from 1,509 the year before.

The Times traced federally sold mustangs through livestock records into a pipeline that led toward Canadian slaughter plants. In one case, an Ohio livestock trader bought scores of mustangs for $25 each, resold them quickly, denied selling them for slaughter, and refused to say where they went.

BLM says its policy is not to sell wild horses and burros to slaughterhouses or “kill buyers.” That is important, and we should be fair enough to say it. The problem exposed by the Times is what can happen once the government sells an animal into private hands, federal protections fall away, and subsequent buyers enter the picture.

There is also an enormous financial incentive to get animals out of federal holding.

BLM says it had 58,025 horses and burros in off-range holding as of May, and off-range holding consumed $101 million in fiscal 2024, roughly two-thirds of the program’s expenditures. The Times reported that the government estimated selling the 3,700 horses in 2025 would save about $56 million in future care.

Now, before somebody screenshots three sentences and announces that Off Script claims Trump is putting Mustang burgers in the meat case:

No.

There is no evidence connecting those wild horses to Trump’s beef-import plan. There is no evidence that horse meat is being slipped into American hamburger. That would be a completely different story, and we do not have it.

What we do have is one federal food-and-livestock story where we’re asking where the meat is coming from, and another where we’re asking where did the animals go?

You have to admit Washington has developed a strange allergy to the word where.

The Soylent Green Problem

Nobody is saying USDA has started consulting Soylent Green for menu ideas.

But the whole thing has acquired just enough dystopian supermarket energy to make that joke work.

The American cattle herd is at a 75-year low. More than 100,000 beef-cow operations disappeared between the last two agricultural censuses. Beef prices are hammering families, and the ranchers we need to rebuild the herd say Trump’s solution could make rebuilding it harder.

Then Washington announces hundreds of thousands of tons of discounted foreign beef.

“Where’s it coming from?”

“I don’t want to say.”

Jesus Christ.

Nobody needs to invent the creepy part. The creepy part is the transcript.

Food origin is not some nosy detail consumers have no business asking about. We have inspection systems, labeling requirements, and international agreements precisely because knowing where food comes from matters. If the president is so confident this is the “highest quality beef,” identifying the countries providing it should be the least interesting part of the announcement.

Instead, it became the most interesting part.

That was entirely his choice.

Cheap Hamburger Is Not a Cattle Policy

Here’s what keeps getting lost in the scramble to shave a few bucks off the grocery bill.

America has a cattle-production problem.

We have fewer animals. We have lost tens of thousands of producers. It takes years to rebuild breeding herds. Ranchers have been squeezed by drought, feed costs and volatile markets, while Mexican cattle imports have been interrupted by a livestock pest.

Those problems will still exist on Day 91.

The imported beef may provide some additional supply. Maybe it nudges prices down a little. If it does, consumers deserve the break.

But if the same policy knocks cattle prices down enough to convince another round of American producers that rebuilding isn’t worth the risk, we will have performed one hell of a magic trick.

We will have “solved” the beef shortage by making ourselves more dependent on foreign beef.

And the next time prices explode, Washington can announce another emergency shipment.

Perhaps by then they’ll even tell us where it came from.

THE RECORD

86.2 million — Cattle and calves on U.S. farms on January 1, 2026. The national herd is at roughly a 75-year low.

27.6 million — Beef cows on January 1, down 1% from the year before. The July beef-cow count remained down 1% year over year.

106,884 — Fewer farms with beef cows in the 2022 Census of Agriculture than in 2017. That averages roughly 59 disappearing operations per day across the five-year census period.

150,569 — Decline in the total number of farms with cattle and calves from 2017 to 2022.

9.4% — Year-over-year increase in beef and veal prices in July. Ground beef was up 9%.

300,000 metric tons — Additional imported product for ground beef Trump says will receive lower tariff treatment for 90 days.

25% — Trump’s claimed discount from current market prices.

Countries supplying it — Trump: “I don’t want to say.”

80,000 metric tons — Additional low-tariff access granted to Argentine beef earlier this year. USDA says Argentine exporters have been prioritizing the U.S. market.

22 tons — Argentine beef shipment rejected by China in March after chloramphenicol was detected. Argentina’s follow-up investigation said it found no evidence that the prohibited drug had been used on the 12 cattle operations it inspected.

Those are the facts.

The herd shortage is real. The disappearing cattle operations are real. Trump’s expanded Argentine beef access is real. China’s rejection of one Argentine shipment is real. The new 300,000-ton import announcement is real.

The thing we still don’t know is embarrassingly simple.

Where is the beef coming from?

That shouldn’t require a security clearance.

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

1. “Obesity dropped 3% this year because our health policies are working.”

Bullshit: There appears to be a real decline. Kennedy just moved the starting line so he could take credit for it.

Why: RFK Jr. said Monday that obesity fell about 3% “this year” and pointed to healthier eating and administration policies. The Gallup data he appears to be citing actually show a 3.5-point decline since 2022, with roughly two-thirds of it occurring before Trump returned to office. Researchers also say there’s little evidence Americans suddenly transformed their diets, while soaring use of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs may be playing a role. Good news doesn’t need a fake birthday.

2. “Zohran Mamdani is requiring ID to shop at New York City’s government grocery stores.”

Bullshit: No, he isn’t. Apparently voter-ID arguments weren’t producing enough fundraising emails, so somebody moved them to the produce aisle.

Why: Florida Republican Randy Fine claimed Mamdani was “requiring ID” to shop at city-run grocery stores. PolitiFact found the claim false. Whatever arguments people want to have about Mamdani’s grocery-store proposal, a requirement that shoppers present identification isn’t part of it. This is what happens when an ordinary policy disagreement isn’t scary enough and somebody decides it needs a fake detail.

3. “Angie Nixon wants to defund the police, stop funding the military, open the border and let noncitizens vote.”

Bullshit: Joining an organization does not magically download every sentence of its platform into your brain.

Why: Republican Sen. Ashley Moody used Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America to attribute a string of DSA positions directly to Nixon. Nixon does belong to the organization, but it hasn’t endorsed her; she has explicitly said she does not agree with its entire platform, and her own stated positions include supporting public safety and securing the border while creating legal paths to citizenship. There’s plenty to argue about without renting somebody else’s platform and pretending she wrote it.

4. “My law lets families sue Google and YouTube when their children are harmed.”

Bullshit: Sen. Ed Markey wrote the children’s privacy law. He apparently forgot what remedies he put in it.

Why: During the Massachusetts Democratic Senate debate, Markey pointed to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and said families can sue companies such as Google and YouTube if their kids are harmed. They cannot sue under COPPA itself. Enforcement belongs to federal regulators and state attorneys general. Parents may sometimes sue under separate state laws, but that is a different legal animal. When politicians start taking credit for legislation they actually wrote, asking them to remember what’s in it doesn’t seem overly demanding.

Want your own Bullshit Detector? The full Bullshit Detector guide is free to Off Script subscribers, or available for $4.95 through the Tom Hicks Media Store.

Elsewhere at Tom Hicks Media

Tom’s Number Ones
Six charts. One date. The songs that were actually sitting at No. 1 while the rest of the world was busy making history.

Lotus Purrspective
Life, furniture ownership, and the inexplicable behavior of humans, explained by a tuxedo cat who remains convinced the house would run considerably better if everyone simply followed instructions.

Panic Room Sports
A new issue drops today with NFL and fantasy football coverage for people who would rather check the evidence before pulling the fire alarm. Everybody reacts. We check the tape first.

Rabbit Ears Classic TV
The shows everybody remembers, the ones they forgot, and the strange stories hiding behind both. New issues Mondays and Thursdays.

The Backlot Ghost
Classic movies leave things behind. The Backlot Ghost goes looking for them after the studio lights go out. A new issue arrives tomorrow.

Buy Me a Cup of Tea

Off Script doesn’t have a corporate parent, billionaire owner, or committee deciding which questions are impolite.

If you appreciate independent reporting that checks the numbers before throwing the punch, you can help keep it going by buying me a cup of tea. It helps cover research, publishing costs, and the increasingly necessary caffeine required when the president announces 300,000 metric tons of mystery beef and somehow “Where is it from?” becomes the difficult question.

One Question Before You Go

If the government promised you foreign beef was 25% cheaper and perfectly safe but refused to tell you which country it came from, would you put it in your cart?

And if the answer is no, what would you need to know before you changed your mind?

#OffScript #TomHicksMedia #BeefPrices #AmericanRanchers #FoodSupply #Agriculture #Trump #BullshitDetector

Editorial Note

A headline making the rounds this weekend says American wages have fallen to roughly 43% of national income, their lowest share since the Great Depression, and asks whether Richard Nixon caused the whole mess when he severed the dollar’s final link to gold in 1971. There’s a legitimate story underneath that headline, but it gets more interesting once you stop trying to blame one president and one monetary decision for half a century of economic change.

The 43% figure measures wages and salaries, not everything workers receive in compensation. Employer-paid benefits such as health insurance and retirement contributions are excluded, which means Americans have not somehow watched 57% of their paychecks disappear. The article itself acknowledges that distinction, and it matters.

What matters even more is another number that requires considerably less explaining.

Here’s the Number That Should Piss You Off

On August 6, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that labor’s share of nonfarm business output fell to 52.9% in the second quarter of 2026. BLS defines labor share as the percentage of output that goes to workers in compensation, so this one includes more than somebody’s base wage. It is the lowest reading since the series began in the first quarter of 1947.

In that same quarter, worker productivity increased at a 1.4% annual rate. Output increased 1.7%, while hours worked increased only 0.3%, meaning American workers once again managed to squeeze more production out of the time they spent working. Over the previous year, productivity increased 2.2%.

Now comes the fun part, assuming your definition of fun includes checking whether your blood pressure medication is nearby. Inflation-adjusted hourly compensation fell 3.1% during the quarter at an annual rate and was down 0.1% from a year earlier. Workers became more productive while their share of what they produced fell to a 79-year low.

That isn’t a slogan from Bernie Sanders. It isn’t a meme somebody slapped together on Facebook at 2:30 in the morning. Those numbers came from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And they raise a fairly obvious question.

Who got the rest?

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Funny You Should Ask

Corporate America isn’t exactly rummaging through the couch cushions.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that corporate profits from current production were running at an annualized $4.426 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, up from $4.352 trillion in the previous quarter. For all of 2025, the figure was $4.078 trillion.

There is nothing inherently sinister about a company making a profit. If you open a sandwich shop, sell a lot of sandwiches and make money doing it, congratulations. That’s generally why you opened the damn sandwich shop.

The problem begins when an economy can produce record-low labor shares alongside enormous corporate profits and then spend years telling workers the real problem is that they need to become more productive. They already did. The productivity showed up.

The money just didn’t necessarily show up in the same place.

The Great American Split

For decades after World War II, worker compensation and productivity generally moved together. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found that from 1947 to 1973, real hourly compensation increased at roughly the same rate as labor productivity. The separation became increasingly pronounced afterward, and since 2000, declining labor share itself has become an important part of that gap.

The Economic Policy Institute, using BLS and BEA data with adjustments designed to compare productivity with compensation for ordinary production and nonsupervisory workers, puts the modern divergence in terms anyone can understand. From the fourth quarter of 1979 through the first quarter of 2026, productivity increased 93.2%. Compensation for those workers increased 33.7%.

That doesn’t mean nobody’s income rose along with productivity. Some people’s income did spectacularly well. EPI finds that a growing share of the gains went toward highly paid corporate and professional employees and toward profits and returns received by shareholders and other owners of capital.

So we’ve spent decades having the wrong argument. Americans keep getting asked whether workers deserve raises as though productivity is something they’re supposed to provide in advance as proof of good behavior.

They provided it.

So Did Nixon Screw Everybody?

On August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon announced that the United States would suspend the dollar’s convertibility into gold. Under Bretton Woods, foreign governments had been able to exchange dollars for U.S. gold at a fixed price, but mounting U.S. deficits, inflation, and more dollars circulating abroad than America could realistically redeem were putting the system under enormous strain. Nixon closed what became known as the gold window, and by 1973 the major currencies had largely moved to floating exchange rates.

If you look at a chart showing productivity and worker compensation separating during the 1970s, it’s tempting to circle 1971 with a red marker and yell, There! Nixon did it!

History is rarely considerate enough to be that simple.

The end of gold convertibility absolutely changed the international monetary system, and the dollar’s purchasing power has declined substantially over the decades since. But the Federal Reserve’s own history shows the Bretton Woods system was already under tremendous pressure from inflation, U.S. deficits and an insufficient gold stock before Nixon acted. The Great Inflation had begun years before the gold window closed and continued well afterward.

More importantly, economists studying the decline in labor’s share haven’t found a smoking gold bar.

BLS reviews of the research point toward a messier combination of forces: automation replacing some labor, offshoring and globalization, changes in the mix of industries, increased use of imported inputs, and capital-intensive businesses capturing larger portions of their markets. Researchers have also looked at declining worker bargaining power, outsourcing, weaker unions, and the rise of highly profitable “superstar” companies that can generate enormous sales with comparatively fewer employees.

That’s frustrating if you want one guy, one date and one button marked THIS IS WHERE EVERYTHING WENT TO HELL.

Economies don’t usually come with one.

There Was Another Big Change

In 1983, the first year for which comparable BLS figures are available, 20.1% of American wage and salary workers belonged to unions. In 2025, it was 10%. In the private sector, union membership has fallen to 5.9%.

Whether you love unions, hate unions, or regard them the way you regard a suspicious noise coming from the basement, bargaining power matters. An individual worker asking a multibillion-dollar corporation for more money does not walk into that conversation holding the same cards as thousands of workers negotiating together. You don’t need a Che Guevara poster over your bed to understand leverage.

BLS research has specifically identified declining union membership, offshoring, outsourcing, and restrictions on worker mobility as possible contributors to reduced worker bargaining power. Automation can strengthen the company’s hand further because the worker isn’t merely bargaining against another human willing to accept less. Sometimes he’s bargaining against a machine that doesn’t require health insurance, vacation days or lunch.

That’s quite a change from an economy in which productivity gains and worker compensation routinely traveled together.

It Wasn’t Inevitable

This is the part I find hardest to swallow.

We’re often told the modern economy simply evolved this way. Technology changed. Manufacturing moved. Global competition arrived. Computers happened, robots showed up, and apparently everybody was supposed to shrug while the paycheck wandered off in another direction.

Except different policies decide who has leverage when those changes occur.

Tax rules decide how different forms of income are treated. Labor law helps determine how easily employees can organize. Antitrust enforcement affects how concentrated corporate power becomes. Trade rules determine the conditions under which companies move production abroad, while minimum-wage policy sets a floor under the bottom of the labor market.

Those are choices.

You can disagree over which choices were wise. You can argue that some regulations hurt growth, that unions can abuse their power, that protectionism creates its own problems, or that automation ultimately creates jobs we haven’t imagined yet. Those are worthwhile arguments.

What isn’t an argument anymore is whether workers are producing enough.

The government already answered that.

THE RECORD

• 52.9%: Labor’s share of nonfarm business output in Q2 2026, the lowest reading in the BLS series dating to 1947.

• +2.2%: Increase in nonfarm business productivity from Q2 2025 to Q2 2026.

• -0.1%: Change in real hourly compensation over the same four-quarter period.

• $4.426 trillion: Annualized corporate profits from current production in Q1 2026.

• 93.2% vs. 33.7%: Growth in productivity versus compensation for typical production and nonsupervisory workers since late 1979, according to EPI’s current tracker.

• 10%: The union membership rate in 2025, compared with 20.1% in 1983.

Stop Telling People the Economy Is Great

This is where politicians of both parties repeatedly screw up.

They walk onto television holding GDP numbers, unemployment numbers, stock-market numbers, or some other statistic suggesting the American economy is doing wonderfully, then seem genuinely puzzled when millions of people respond, Wonderful for fucking whom?

That’s not economic illiteracy.

GDP can grow while somebody struggles to buy groceries. The stock market can set records while the person stocking the supermarket shelves has no stocks. Corporate profits can soar while the worker who helped generate those profits watches his rent renew at another hundred bucks a month.

People experience the economy through their checking accounts.

When those accounts don’t resemble the economy they’re hearing about on television, eventually they stop believing the people on television.

About That 43% Headline

The viral number that got me looking into this deserves one more visit because we shouldn’t commit bullshit while complaining about everybody else’s.

The roughly 43% figure refers to wages and salaries as a share of domestic income. It leaves out employer-paid benefits, so it is a narrower measure than the BLS labor-share figure and shouldn’t be described as though workers receive only 43 cents of every dollar their work produces. The distinction is significant.

But correcting an overstated interpretation doesn’t make the underlying problem disappear.

When the broader BLS measure that does include compensation says labor’s share has fallen to 52.9%, the lowest reading since Harry Truman was president, there isn’t much need to juice the headline. The accurate number is already ugly enough.

The Plumbing Problem

For most of my life I’ve heard some variation of the same promise: grow the economy and everybody eventually benefits.

Sometimes that’s true. Productivity creates more wealth that can be divided among workers, investors, business owners, and everybody else who participates in the economy. An economy that produces more has more to distribute.

But distribution is the entire damn point.

If productivity rises while the worker’s share falls, telling that worker to celebrate economic growth is like congratulating the cook because the restaurant had its best night ever while somebody else pocketed the tips.

American workers haven’t forgotten how to work. They haven’t stopped producing. They haven’t failed to become more efficient.

They did what they were told.

Now their share of the output is the lowest BLS has ever recorded.

For fifty years, Americans have been told that if the economy grows, everybody eventually gets wet.

At some point we should probably admit the trickle has a fucking plumbing problem.

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

The internet did not take Sunday off, and neither did the people manufacturing nonsense. Here are four claims currently wandering around without adult supervision.

“A Census report proved 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election.”

Donald Trump promoted a report as evidence that more than 24,000 noncitizens voted in 2020, but election experts say the analysis has serious methodological problems and likely false matches. Even if every identified case were valid, the number would represent about 0.015% of votes cast and could not remotely account for Joe Biden’s national margin of more than 7 million votes. Bullshit Detector verdict: A questionable estimate being sold as proof it doesn’t provide.

“Trump caused the big drop in crime.”

The FBI’s latest annual figures show crime declined in 2025, but Trump has portrayed that decline as a turnaround produced by his administration. The problem is that violent crime was already falling substantially before he returned to office, which makes claiming ownership of the trend a little like arriving during the fourth quarter and taking credit for all the touchdowns. Bullshit Detector verdict: Real decline, bullshit attribution.

“A new study proves splitting the MMR vaccine is safer.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a recent study had emerged that strongly supported separating the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine into individual shots. FactCheck.org could find no credible new study supporting the claim, and decades of evidence support the safety and effectiveness of the combined MMR vaccine. Bullshit Detector verdict: You can’t cite a breakthrough study that apparently exists only when somebody asks about it.

“Susan Collins voted for the Medicaid cuts.”

A Democratic outside group is running an ad saying Republican Sen. Susan Collins “voted to support” the 2025 reconciliation law and its Medicaid cuts. Collins did vote to advance debate on the bill, which is fair game for criticism, but she ultimately voted against final passage and cited Medicaid as a major reason. Bullshit Detector verdict: Attack the procedural vote if you want. Saying she voted for the final bill is false, and bullshit doesn’t become less bullshit because your team produced it.

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EDITORIAL NOTE

There is a version of this story that says Donald Trump is attacking mail voting again. That version is true, easy to write, and about as surprising as discovering water at the bottom of a swimming pool. Trump has spent years attacking voting by mail, and his administration has been pushing new federal restrictions on it throughout 2026. Reuters, Aug. 18

There is another version that says the Postal Service has already begun rejecting Americans’ ballots. That version is wrong. USPS says the final rule it published Friday will not be implemented for the November election unless the courts lift the injunctions currently blocking it. Reuters, Aug. 22

The interesting story sits between those two.

A federal judge ordered USPS not to implement the challenged portion of Trump’s executive order and specifically barred the agency from “initiating or completing rulemaking” for the regulations at issue in the November election. Weeks earlier, USPS itself had publicly promised that it would not publish a final rule until it obtained relief from the injunctions. Then, late Friday, USPS published the 95-page final rule anyway. U.S. District Court order, Aug. 11 USPS Federal Register notice, July 17 Reuters, Aug. 22

Now we have a story.

Donald Trump voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary this month.

The White House confirmed the circumstances after reports of Trump’s mail ballot surfaced, even as Trump continued pushing restrictions on the same method of voting. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales defended the president’s use of it by pointing to exceptions for travel and noting that Trump remains a Palm Beach resident while primarily living at the White House. Reuters also reported that Trump voted by mail in a Florida special election in March. Reuters, Aug. 18

In other words, Donald Trump has personally trusted the United States mail with his vote at least twice this year while arguing that mail voting needs a much heavier federal hand.

That hypocrisy deserves to be called what it is. But even that isn’t the biggest problem hiding in this story.

Trump’s March 31 executive order directed USPS to develop federal standards for mail ballots. Among other things, it called for unique Intelligent Mail barcodes, state-provided lists of voters receiving mail ballots, and a system under which USPS would not transmit certain ballot mail unless the voter had been enrolled on a state-specific list with the Postal Service. Executive Order 14399, Federal Register

The order also directed USPS to coordinate with its inspector general and the Justice Department on suspected unlawful use of the mail involving federal election materials. It required any final rule under that section to be issued within 120 days. Executive Order 14399, Sections 3(c) and 3(d)

That is considerably more than asking election offices to put the right postage on an envelope.

And that is where the courts entered the picture.

THE COURT SAID THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH DOESN’T GET TO DO THIS

In June, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled against major portions of Trump’s election order in a lawsuit brought by states challenging the administration. Her order barred USPS from implementing the challenged mail-ballot provisions against the plaintiff states for the November election and prohibited the agency from “initiating or completing rulemaking” to promulgate those regulations for that election. The court also ordered federal defendants to notify relevant employees that Sections 2 and 3 of the executive order were “unlawful, null, and void” as applied to those states. U.S. District Court order, June 25

Then came a second case brought by voting-rights organizations.

On August 11, Talwani issued a broader preliminary injunction covering USPS implementation of Section 3 for the November 3 election or any earlier federal election. Her conclusion on the constitutional question did not require a translator: “The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections.” U.S. District Court memorandum and order, Aug. 11

The injunction barred USPS from implementing, enforcing or giving effect to Section 3 for the November election, including refusing to transmit mail ballots. Then it added the language that makes everything that happened Friday worth watching: USPS was also barred from “initiating or completing rulemaking” for the specified regulations. U.S. District Court order, Aug. 11

That alone creates a legitimate legal question about publishing a final rule while the injunction remains in place.

But USPS had already made the situation even clearer itself.

USPS MADE A PROMISE IN WRITING

On July 17, the Postal Service published a Privacy Act notice describing the records system it intended to use with its new Federal Ballot Mail Portal. Right at the beginning, USPS acknowledged that the ballot-mail rule was subject to two injunctions being appealed. Then the agency wrote this: “The Postal Service will not publish a final rule unless and until the government obtains relief from all relevant injunctions.” USPS Federal Register Privacy Act notice, July 17

There is not much wiggle room in that sentence.

USPS did not say it would publish the rule but decline to enforce it. It did not say it would finish the rule and hold implementation. It said it would not publish a final rule unless and until the government obtained relief from the injunctions. USPS Federal Register Privacy Act notice, July 17

On Friday night, with the court restrictions still in place, USPS published the final rule.

Reuters reported that USPS says it did so to allow the rule to take effect quickly if the courts later lift the injunctions. The agency says it will take no action to implement the rule for the 2026 election unless that happens. Reuters, Aug. 22

There is an obvious question now.

If a court tells an agency not to complete a rulemaking, and the agency itself promises not to publish the final rule without court relief, what exactly are we supposed to call it when the agency publishes the final rule before getting that relief?

KEEP READING THE BLIND SPOT

This is where the story stops being a fight over envelopes and starts becoming a fight over federal power.

Behind the paywall, we’re going into the Postal Service’s own documents. They describe a federal system built to hold voter names, home addresses, and the unique barcodes attached to both outbound and return ballot envelopes. USPS says one stated purpose of that system is to “facilitate law enforcement efforts,” and the records are scheduled to be retained for five years. USPS Federal Ballot Mail system notice USPS five-year retention policy

Then there is the bigger question.

When the federal government cannot directly take over a state function, how much control can it gain by taking control of something that function needs?

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WHAT USPS WANTS STATES TO HAND OVER

The phrase “Federal Ballot Mail Portal” sounds like something dreamed up by a committee whose greatest fear is interesting nouns.

What goes into it is more interesting.

USPS’s July Privacy Act filing says the system would receive a list of people who are sent mail or absentee ballots in federal elections. For each person, the system would contain the individual’s address, the unique Intelligent Mail barcode printed on the outbound ballot envelope, the barcode printed on the return ballot envelope and the state that issued the ballot. USPS Federal Register Privacy Act notice

The categories of records are equally plain. USPS lists the voter’s name, address, unique barcode numbers, and originating election-office state. The filing says those records can be retrieved using personal identifiers including first and last name, address, issuing state, and barcode. USPS Federal Ballot Mail records description

That does not mean USPS knows how you voted.

The Postal Service says it will not inspect ballot contents, and Reuters reports that the final rule does not collect party affiliation. Postal workers are not suddenly going to steam open envelopes in the back room and see whether Aunt Martha voted Republican. Reuters, Aug. 22

Good.

That still leaves the federal government holding a database connecting a voter’s identity and address to unique tracking information on the envelopes carrying that person’s ballot.

Those are different concerns, and we should be capable of holding both thoughts in our heads at the same time.

THEN THERE’S THE FIVE-YEAR PART

The Postal Service’s own filing says the records in the Federal Ballot Mail system would be retained for five years.

That filing also says the records would be retrievable by name, address, issuing state, and barcode. USPS says access would be limited to personnel whose official duties require it, facilities would have access controls, and online transmissions would be encrypted. USPS retention and safeguards notice

Those protections matter. Pretending otherwise would turn this into the kind of hysterical bullshit we usually spend our time mocking.

But safeguards answer the question of how the government says it will protect the database. They do not answer why a federal postal agency needs a five-year voter-linked ballot-envelope database in the first place.

USPS supplies an answer to that too.

The very first stated purpose of the system is “To help determine adherence to federal law and facilitate law enforcement efforts.” Another stated purpose is receiving the voter lists, addresses, outbound and return barcodes and issuing-state information. USPS Federal Ballot Mail system purposes

There is the part I cannot get past.

We have moved a long way from delivering the mail.

THE POWER IS IN THE CHOKEPOINT

The Constitution gives states broad authority over the mechanics of elections, subject to Congress’s constitutional powers over federal elections. Talwani relied on that allocation of power when she concluded that the executive branch did not possess the authority Trump was trying to exercise through the order. U.S. District Court memorandum and order, Aug. 11

The Trump administration’s approach does something more subtle than announcing that Washington will run state elections.

It uses infrastructure.

A state can administer its own election, maintain its own voter rolls, decide who qualifies for an absentee ballot under state law and prepare those ballots itself. But if the federal agency controlling the mail can attach federal conditions to the moment those ballots enter the postal system, Washington has gained leverage over the election without moving the entire election apparatus to Washington.

That is the Blind Spot.

Control the choke point, and you don’t necessarily have to control everything upstream.

Trump’s executive order directed USPS to develop a process under which states could submit lists of mail-ballot voters, and USPS would maintain state-specific participation lists. The order said USPS should not transmit covered ballots from individuals unless they had been enrolled on the relevant list, and it required unique ballot-envelope identifiers such as barcodes. Executive Order 14399, Section 3

The Postal Service’s June proposed rule translated much of that into postal procedure. It described the Federal Ballot Mail Portal, unique barcode requirements, and compliance checks tied to ballot-mail preparation. USPS proposed rule, June 2

Reuters reports that the final rule published Friday continues to require states to provide USPS with names and barcodes tied to mail ballots, including unique barcodes for outbound and return envelopes. USPS says the final rule will not be implemented unless the courts allow it. Reuters, Aug. 22

That last sentence is important.

Nobody should leave this article believing the system is operating today.

But nobody should leave believing this is theoretical anymore, either.

The final rule is written.

THE PRESIDENT WHO TRUSTS HIS OWN BALLOT

And now we come back to Donald Trump.

The White House acknowledged this month that Trump voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary. The administration defended his use of the system under exceptions it supports for circumstances such as travel, while continuing to argue against universal mail voting as too susceptible to fraud. Reuters, Aug. 18

Trump also voted by mail in a Florida special election in March.

So we can dispense with the idea that the president believes putting a ballot into the mail is inherently too dangerous to trust. He has trusted it with his own vote more than once. Reuters, Aug. 18

The administration can make a perfectly legitimate policy argument that absentee voting with defined eligibility requirements is different from automatically mailing ballots to every registered voter.

Fine. Make that argument.

What it cannot do is use Trump’s rhetoric about mail voting as though the mechanism itself becomes safe or unsafe depending upon who happens to be using it.

Trump called mail ballots “cheating,” Reuters reported, and continues pressing Congress and federal agencies for tighter restrictions. Then he requested one, filled it out and mailed it back. Reuters, Aug. 18

If voting by mail is trustworthy enough for the president of the United States, Americans are entitled to ask why everybody else requires a new federal database, individually linked envelope barcodes and a Postal Service system designed in part to facilitate law enforcement.

That isn’t partisan snark.

It is the obvious question created by his own behavior.

THIS ISN’T A CONTEMPT RULING

There is one place where we need to be extremely careful.

No court ruling I have found as of Saturday says USPS committed contempt by publishing Friday’s final rule. The Blind Spot is not making that legal conclusion.

The distinction USPS appears to be relying on is that publication is being done in preparation for possible future court relief, while implementation remains frozen. Reuters reports that USPS says it published the rule so it could take effect immediately if the injunctions are lifted. Reuters, Aug. 22

Courts will decide whether that distinction complies with the existing orders.

But we do not have to pretend the wording of those orders disappeared.

The August 11 injunction expressly bars USPS from “initiating or completing rulemaking” for the specified regulations for the November election. The July 17 USPS filing expressly said the agency would not publish a final rule until the government obtained relief from the relevant injunctions. Federal court order, Aug. 11 USPS Federal Register notice, July 17

Then USPS published the final rule while those injunctions remained.

You do not need a law degree to understand why lawyers are going to have something to talk about.

THE REAL BLIND SPOT

The mail-voting argument is going to swallow most of the attention because that is how political coverage works now. Republicans will talk about fraud. Democrats will talk about voter suppression. Cable television will locate eight people willing to scream at one another by dinner.

Meanwhile, the more durable question is sitting underneath all of it.

How much power can a president gain over something the Constitution does not assign to him by ordering an executive-branch agency to regulate the infrastructure that something depends on?

Judge Talwani answered the first part of that question forcefully. Her August ruling says the executive branch has no authority to regulate elections, and her injunction blocked USPS from implementing the challenged requirements for November. U.S. District Court memorandum and order, Aug. 11

The administration is entitled to challenge that ruling through the courts.

What deserves scrutiny is what happens while those challenges play out.

USPS was told not to complete the specified rulemaking for November.

USPS publicly said it would not publish a final rule without relief from the injunctions.

Then it published one.

Maybe a higher court ultimately clears the road and the rule becomes lawful to implement. Maybe the administration loses, and the thing remains a 95-page monument to an idea that never got off the ground.

Either way, something important happened Friday night.

The government reached a stop sign, finished building what was on the other side, and parked it there with the engine running.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, mailed in his ballot.

THE RECORD

MARCH 31: Trump signs Executive Order 14399, directing USPS to develop new federal ballot-mail requirements including unique barcodes and state-specific mail-ballot participation lists. Executive Order 14399

JUNE 25: Judge Indira Talwani blocks major portions of the executive order as applied to the plaintiff states and bars USPS from completing the challenged rulemaking for the November election. Federal court order, June 25

JULY 17: USPS publishes a Privacy Act notice saying it “will not publish a final rule unless and until” the government obtains relief from the injunctions. The same notice describes the voter data and five-year record retention contemplated for the Federal Ballot Mail system. USPS Federal Register notice, July 17

AUGUST 11: Talwani issues a broader preliminary injunction, stating that “The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections” and again barring USPS from initiating or completing the specified rulemaking for November. Federal court order, Aug. 11

AUGUST 18: The White House defends Trump’s use of a mail ballot in Florida’s Republican primary. Reuters reports that he also voted by mail in a Florida special election in March. Reuters, Aug. 18

AUGUST 21: USPS publishes its 95-page final rule while saying it will not implement the changes unless the injunctions are lifted. Reuters, Aug. 22

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

TRUMP: THE CENSUS PROVED 24,000 NONCITIZENS VOTED IN 2020

BULLSHIT. Trump claimed a preliminary Census Bureau analysis proves more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in 2020. The report itself does not establish that, and election experts say its methodology leaves substantial room for false matches involving names, addresses and outdated citizenship records. Even if every one of those 24,000 cases proved legitimate, they would represent about 0.015 percent of the presidential vote and would not have changed the winner of any state. Associated Press

TRUMP: HIS POLICIES CAUSED THE HISTORIC DROP IN CRIME

BULLSHIT, WITH AN ASTERISK. The crime drop is real. Trump’s claim to have caused it is where things come apart. FBI data show violent crime was already falling during the final two years of the Biden administration, while criminologists say the continued decline has multiple causes and cannot honestly be pinned on one president or one policy. Trump has also claimed crime fell 70 to 80 percent in cities where he deployed the National Guard, figures that do not line up cleanly with local police data. FactCheck.org

RFK JR.: A NEW STUDY PROVES THE MMR VACCINE SHOULD BE SPLIT UP

BULLSHIT. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said a recent study had “just come out” strongly supporting separating the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. FactCheck.org searched the medical literature, consulted vaccine experts and found no credible new study supporting that claim. One recent study involving records from more than 2.5 million American children instead reinforced the safety of the combined vaccine and found no association between MMR vaccination and autism. HHS did not identify the study Kennedy said existed. FactCheck.org

DEMOCRATIC AD: SUSAN COLLINS VOTED FOR TRUMP’S MEDICAID CUTS

ALSO BULLSHIT. A Democratic outside group running ads in Maine says Republican Sen. Susan Collins “voted to support” Trump’s legislation containing major Medicaid cuts. Collins did vote to advance the bill to debate, which Democrats are perfectly entitled to criticize. But when the Senate actually voted on passage, she joined every Democrat and two other Republicans in voting against it, citing the Medicaid provisions as a major reason. Political advertising doesn’t get a truth exemption because we happen to dislike the person being attacked. FactCheck.org

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

Forget for a moment whether you support or oppose mail voting.

If a federal court tells an agency not to complete a rulemaking, and that agency has separately promised it will not publish the final rule until the injunction is lifted, what would you call publishing it anyway?

I want to know where you draw that line.

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EDITORIAL NOTE

This is an opinion and analysis column based on reporting available Friday, August 21, 2026. Reported facts are sourced throughout. The Pentagon has confirmed the separation notices but, as of publication, has offered little public explanation beyond the personnel actions themselves.

There are words you expect to hear around the Pentagon. Deployment. Readiness. Chain of command. Insubordination certainly belongs on the list.

Journalism generally does not.

Yet on Friday, the Defense Department fired Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, publisher Max Lederer and Middle East reporter Lara Korte. Slavin says he was fired for insubordination because he publicly said censorship of the newspaper would cross a red line.

Read that again, because it sounds worse the second time.

Slavin wasn’t accused of publishing classified battle plans. He wasn’t accused of fabricating a story, endangering troops or handing information to an enemy. According to Slavin, his offense was saying that if the Pentagon ever ordered Stars and Stripes to replace accurate journalism with government-approved copy, “that would be a red line.”

Apparently somebody found the red line and decided to fire the guy standing next to it.

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THIS WASN’T A FRIDAY AFTERNOON TANTRUM

The most important detail may be the one that happened nine days earlier.

According to The Washington Post, Defense Department official Andrew Brey emailed Lederer on August 12 and asked him to fire Slavin and Korte because they participated in the CBS interview. Lederer didn’t do it. On Friday, all three received separation notices, with the Pentagon telling The Post that Lederer was fired for cause due to insubordination.

That’s considerably harder to wave away as routine management.

Korte’s supposedly troublesome contribution to that CBS interview was explaining who she worked for. She said she worked for Stars and Stripes, “not for the Pentagon,” and that her job was covering the military community.

There are scandals in Washington that require 14 flowcharts, three anonymous sources and a Sherpa to understand.

This isn’t one of them.

A reporter for an editorially independent military newspaper said she wasn’t a Pentagon spokesperson. The editor said censorship would be unacceptable. Their boss was told to fire them. He didn’t. Now the Pentagon is firing all three.

If somebody has a benign explanation for that sequence of events, this would be an excellent fucking time to share it.

THE “MODERNIZATION” THAT KEEPS LOOKING LIKE CONTROL

The Pentagon didn’t wake up Friday morning and suddenly discover Stars and Stripes.

In January, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced that the department would overhaul the publication and move it away from what he called “woke distractions.” In March, a Pentagon memo restricted the paper’s use of paid wire services such as the Associated Press and required its content to remain consistent with “good order and discipline,” language normally associated with military command and military justice.

That is a strange standard to hang over a newsroom.

Journalists aren’t supposed to maintain good order. They’re supposed to tell you when the barracks are falling apart, when military families are struggling, when weapons programs don’t work, when commanders screw up and when somebody in Washington would prefer you didn’t know any of those things.

CBS noted that Stars and Stripes has reported on deteriorating military housing, barracks problems, and alleged neglect at military child care facilities. That’s precisely why independence matters. A newspaper that can only publish stories flattering the institution it covers isn’t a newspaper for very long.

It becomes a newsletter from Human Resources with camouflage around the edges.

THEN THEY FIRED THE WATCHDOG

Congress created an ombudsman position specifically to help protect the editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. Jacqueline Smith held that job.

In April, the Pentagon fired her after she publicly challenged the department’s restrictions on the newspaper. Smith has since sued, alleging retaliation and First Amendment violations. The government is contesting litigation surrounding its actions, so those allegations remain allegations, but the firing itself is not in dispute.

Then came another move.

This month the Pentagon installed active-duty Navy Capt. William Urban as deputy publisher without consulting Lederer, according to reporting and a letter from Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren and Jeanne Shaheen. The senators warned that putting an active-duty public affairs officer into senior leadership at an editorially independent publication raised obvious questions about separation from the military chain of command.

Lederer announced his retirement shortly afterward, saying his view of the mission of Stars and Stripes differed fundamentally from the Pentagon leadership’s direction for it. He had spent nearly two decades as publisher.

He wasn’t even allowed to finish the month.

THERE IS ANOTHER SIDE. IT ISN’T VERY REASSURING.

Urban says he was given repeated assurances that the Pentagon remains committed to the editorial independence of Stars and Stripes. In an open letter Friday, he pointed to the paper’s recent reporting on poor conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as evidence that the department had not shut down unwanted coverage.

Fair enough. Put that in the record.

But here’s the problem.

You don’t demonstrate your commitment to an independent newsroom by firing the editor who publicly defended its independence, firing the reporter who said she doesn’t work for the Pentagon, firing the publisher who declined to fire them, firing the ombudsman who previously defended independence, and dropping an active-duty officer into senior management.

At some point the assurances begin having trouble competing with the evidence.

WHO IS STARS AND STRIPES SUPPOSED TO SERVE?

This is the question underneath everything else.

Stars and Stripes is unusual because it exists inside the military world while retaining a long tradition of editorial independence from the people running that world. It was first published during the Civil War and has continuously covered the American military community since World War II. Generations of troops stationed far from home have read it precisely because it isn’t supposed to be another command bulletin.

That arrangement inevitably produces tension.

Good.

Independent journalism that never irritates the institution it covers probably isn’t doing much journalism.

There is no contradiction between supporting the military and reporting honestly about it. In fact, service members may have a greater need for honest reporting than almost anybody else because decisions made inside that building can determine where they’re sent, what equipment they receive, where their families live and whether they come home.

They are adults entrusted with weapons, national security, and sometimes life-and-death decisions.

I think they can survive a newspaper.

THE WORD THEY CHOSE MATTERS

That’s what keeps bothering me about this.

Insubordination.

That word makes perfect sense when a service member refuses a lawful order. It makes considerably less sense when applied to civilian journalists defending editorial independence at a publication whose independence the government itself keeps insisting it respects.

Slavin wasn’t commanding a destroyer. Korte wasn’t flying an F-35. They worked for a newspaper.

And the minute a government starts treating journalistic independence as disobedience, we’ve moved into territory where the vocabulary itself should scare the hell out of us.

Because the opposite of an insubordinate newspaper is an obedient one.

We already have a word for that, too.

Propaganda.

THE RECORD

On August 21, 2026, the Defense Department sent separation notices to Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte. The Pentagon confirmed the actions and said the three employees have five days to appeal.

Slavin says he was fired for insubordination after publicly saying hypothetical Pentagon censorship would cross a red line. The Washington Post reports that a Defense Department official asked Lederer on August 12 to fire Slavin and Korte over their participation in the CBS interview.

The actions follow months of conflict over Stars and Stripes, including restrictions on wire-service content, the April firing of its congressionally mandated ombudsman and the appointment this month of an active-duty Navy captain as deputy publisher.

The Pentagon says it remains committed to the publication’s editorial independence. Its new deputy publisher says he received assurances of the same.

We’ll see.

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

THE TARIFF JUST CONFESSED

Trump announced Friday that the United States will temporarily allow another 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to enter at lower tariffs in an attempt to reduce beef prices. That’s interesting, considering we’ve spent years being told foreign countries somehow absorb the cost of tariffs. If lowering a tariff is supposed to lower the price Americans pay at the grocery store, congratulations: somebody just accidentally explained who pays tariffs. American cattle producers, meanwhile, are furious that cheaper imports may hurt them.

NOW WE’RE INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATORS

The Justice Department has asked to interview FBI officials involved in the 2022 Mar-a-Lago search as part of a broader examination of past investigations of Trump, according to Reuters. The request is reportedly voluntary at this stage, which matters. It also matters that the sitting president’s Justice Department is revisiting law-enforcement actions that resulted in the recovery of classified material from his own property. Maybe investigators discover misconduct. If they do, show us. Until then, this deserves a microscope, not a shrug.

THE BALLROOM KEEPS BUILDING

Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily allowed construction on Trump’s White House ballroom to continue Friday while the Supreme Court considers the administration’s emergency appeal. Lower courts had moved to stop above-ground work amid a fight over whether Trump had authority to demolish the East Wing and proceed without congressional approval. The administration says the project is already roughly 65 percent complete. That’s one hell of an argument: We’ve already built most of the thing you’re questioning, so stopping now would be inconvenient.

AND NOW DORIS MILLER’S NAME MAY BE ON THE CHOPPING BLOCK

The Navy is considering changing the name of the future USS Doris Miller, with Trump’s name reportedly among the possibilities. No final decision has been announced. Miller, a Black sailor who fought back during the attack on Pearl Harbor despite having no formal training on the weapon he used, became the first Black recipient of the Navy Cross. The Navy itself announced in 2020 that CVN-81 would honor him. Maybe leave the man’s aircraft carrier alone.

AROUND TOM HICKS MEDIA

Tom’s Number Ones goes back to the charts and the songs that were actually sitting at No. 1, one week at a time.

Lotus Purrspective continues documenting life with humans, apparently because somebody needs to keep records for the eventual trial.

Panic Room Sports checks the tape before joining whatever NFL panic everybody else has already declared a national emergency.

Rabbit Ears TV digs back into classic television, the shows we loved and the stories hiding behind them.

The Backlot Ghost opens its doors this morning. Every movie leaves something behind, and we’re going looking for it.

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

If the Pentagon can fire journalists at Stars and Stripes for publicly defending editorial independence, do you still believe the newspaper can remain genuinely independent?

Tell me what you think in the comments. I have a feeling this one is going to produce some opinions.

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EDITORIAL NOTE

There has been plenty of gossip this week about Donald Trump and Natalie Harp, and I’m not interested in adding to it. Whatever their personal relationship may or may not be has nothing to do with the question sitting in front of us. This is about access, security, judgment, and a White House that apparently tolerated something from one of Trump’s most trusted aides that would get most federal employees shown the door.

Natalie Harp is not some obscure White House employee whose badge gets her into the cafeteria and maybe the good bathroom. She is Trump’s special assistant and executive assistant, routinely at his side, handling information headed his way, helping with his social media, and functioning as one of the gatekeepers around the president. Forbes, citing reporting by MS NOW, says Harp repeatedly declined to complete the routine security-clearance process for more than a year.

Read that again, because the wording matters. She didn’t simply submit the paperwork and get stuck for months in some bureaucratic pile while investigators tried to locate her sophomore-year roommate. According to the reporting, Harp declined the process multiple times for reasons that remain unknown; concerns grew inside the White House counsel’s office and among security officials, and Trump eventually became personally involved before Harp completed the forms for a federal background investigation. She has since received a security clearance.

That’s where this stops being Washington gossip and becomes a legitimate question about how this White House operates. If you work around sensitive government information, the vetting isn’t supposed to depend on whether the boss trusts you, likes you or thinks you make excellent printouts. The entire point of having a security process is that personal loyalty isn’t the security process.

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THIS WASN’T SOME RULE TRUMP INHERITED

Here’s where the story gets even harder to dismiss.

On January 20, 2025, Trump issued his own memorandum addressing a backlog in White House security clearances. That memorandum explicitly said Executive Office personnel who had not received the appropriate clearances were ineligible for access to the White House complex, infrastructure, and technology necessary to perform their jobs. Trump responded by authorizing interim Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearances, but those interim clearances were limited to six months.

So the administration understood the problem from Day One. It understood that people working inside the Executive Office needed to be vetted, understood that clearance delays could interfere with their jobs, and created a specific temporary mechanism to deal with those delays. What it did not announce was a new policy called “Just keep saying no until everybody gets tired of asking.”

The broader rules aren’t particularly mysterious, either. Access to classified information normally requires an eligibility determination following an appropriate investigation, a demonstrated need to know, and a signed nondisclosure agreement. Simply holding a government job or possessing an impressive title doesn’t automatically create a right to classified information.

That doesn’t establish that Harp improperly saw classified documents, and I’m not going to pretend it does. There is no solid public reporting I’ve seen establishing that she read a particular classified document, attended a specific classified briefing without authorization, or committed some criminal security violation. The facts are strange enough without stapling accusations onto them that we can’t prove.

LOOK AT WHERE SHE WAS

The access question gets harder to ignore when you look at Harp’s actual proximity to the president.

Last month, the Secret Service secretly moved Trump from Air Force One in Turkey using a catering truck because of a potential Iranian assassination threat. The tiny group moved with Trump included Harp, deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, and Oval Office operations director Walt Nauta. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stayed aboard the decoy aircraft, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later joined Trump’s secret flight.

Think about what that tells us without inventing anything beyond the facts. When the president’s protective detail decided it needed to quietly move him during a potential national-security threat, Harp was considered important enough, or at least close enough, to move with him. That’s a hell of a lot closer to the center of government than somebody whose clearance status can reasonably be treated as an administrative afterthought.

Former Bush White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter actually supplied the useful caution here. Not every White House employee needs the same security clearance simply because they work in the building, he noted, but somebody traveling close enough to the president to overhear classified conversations on Air Force One could absolutely need one. That’s precisely why the unanswered questions matter more than the gossip.

“SHE HAS A SECURITY CLEARANCE”

The White House response has been technically true and spectacularly unhelpful.

Outgoing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told MS NOW that Harp “has a security clearance like everyone else” and called her a loyal and hardworking member of Trump’s team. Fine. Nobody is disputing that she has one now.

The story is about what happened before now.

Why did she reportedly decline to complete the process repeatedly? Who approved allowing that situation to continue? What access did she have while it was unresolved, what restrictions were placed on her, and why did the president himself apparently have to become involved before one of his closest aides finally completed paperwork every other person requiring a clearance is expected to complete?

Those aren’t gotcha questions. They’re the questions you ask when the government gives enormous access to somebody before the government has finished determining whether that person should have enormous access. If the answers are completely innocent, terrific — release them and make this story boring.

LOYALTY ISN’T A BACKGROUND CHECK

There’s a pattern beneath all of this that bothers me far more than Natalie Harp herself.

Trump places enormous value on personal loyalty. Every president wants trusted people around him, and anyone pretending otherwise hasn’t watched a White House operate since Washington was trying to find somebody to polish his wooden teeth. But government systems exist precisely because “I trust this person” and “this person has been independently vetted” are two very different sentences.

A security clearance isn’t supposed to tell the president whether somebody loves him. It’s supposed to identify vulnerabilities, conflicts, foreign contacts, financial concerns, coercion risks, and other issues that could matter when someone is exposed to sensitive information. Personal devotion doesn’t answer any of those questions.

And that may be what makes the Harp story worth paying attention to. The issue isn’t whether Natalie Harp is loyal to Donald Trump; by every available account, that’s probably the least disputed fact in Washington. The issue is whether loyalty to Donald Trump once again became a substitute for a system whose entire purpose is to protect the presidency from relying solely on personal loyalty.

That’s a much bigger story than who’s sitting next to whom on Air Force One.

THE RECORD

The reporting: MS NOW, citing two people familiar with the matter, reported that Harp declined several times over more than a year to pursue the routine security clearance normally obtained by West Wing staff. White House counsel and security officials eventually became concerned, Trump reportedly intervened, and Harp later completed the paperwork and received clearance. The White House has confirmed her current clearance but has not publicly provided a detailed rebuttal to that reported timeline.

The access: Harp serves as Trump’s special assistant and executive assistant and has become a highly visible gatekeeper around him. A national-security official quoted by MS NOW expressed concern that her proximity to Trump and his residence could expose her to more sensitive information than some more senior officials receive. Her inclusion in Trump’s secret security move out of Turkey last month further demonstrates just how close to the president she operates.

What we do not know: We do not currently have evidence that Harp improperly accessed a particular classified document or deliberately mishandled classified information. We also don’t know why she reportedly resisted completing the clearance process, exactly what interim access she had, or who authorized it. Those missing answers are reasons to keep asking questions, not invitations to invent our own.

THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

“TRUMP’S POLICIES CAUSED THE HISTORIC DROP IN CRIME.”

The FBI’s 2025 numbers really are excellent: violent crime fell 9.7 percent and the murder rate dropped 18.5 percent. The bullshit begins when Trump turns that into proof that his policies caused it, because crime had already been falling for several years and researchers say the reasons behind the latest decline are still unclear. Trump also called the Biden years a violent-crime disaster even though violent crime was lower in Biden’s final year than in Trump’s final year of his first term. Funny how FBI statistics become trustworthy right around the moment they become flattering.

“THE CENSUS BUREAU PROVED 24,000 NONCITIZENS VOTED ILLEGALLY IN 2020.”

Trump says a new Census Bureau analysis “proves” more than 24,000 noncitizens voted in 2020. The seven-page report is unauthored; experts have raised serious methodological problems, and NPR found the analysis wasn’t conducted by the bureau’s career civil servants and involved people affiliated with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. Even Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has asked the bureau for the underlying information behind its claims. Finding possible data matches isn’t the same thing as proving 24,000 crimes, no matter how many capital letters you put around it.

“CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES HAVE A DEAL.”

Trump announced that Canada and the United States “have a DEAL,” then postponed threatened 50 percent tariffs for three days while everybody apparently continued negotiating the deal they supposedly already had. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said substantial progress had been made, but important work remained, and Canada’s trade minister said Thursday the countries were “very close” to an agreement. Maybe they ultimately get there. Until the unfinished thing is finished, though, calling it finished is bullshit with a tariff schedule attached.

“TRUMP SAID THE U.S. WILL USE INDIA’S VOTING MACHINES IN 2028.”

A viral screenshot circulating online purports to show Trump announcing talks with India’s election chief about bringing Indian electronic voting machines to the United States for the 2028 election. He didn’t post it. Fact-checkers found the screenshot had been edited, which means nobody needs to spend the weekend arguing about Trump’s secret plan to import Indian voting machines because there isn’t one. Sometimes bullshit isn’t complicated; somebody just made a picture and waited for the internet to do what the internet does.

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

Forget Natalie Harp’s name for a minute and make this about any president and any aide. If someone with extraordinary access to the president repeatedly declined routine security vetting for more than a year, should that person have been allowed to keep the same level of access while the issue remained unresolved? I’m genuinely curious where you draw that line.

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I want somebody to explain the word voluntary to me, because apparently I’ve been using the fucking thing wrong for seventy years.

If I walk into a restaurant, look at the menu, order the meatloaf instead of the chicken, and nobody has a gun pointed at me, that’s voluntary. If the government controls where I’m living, controls whether I remain detained, has the power to deport me, sends somebody over to persuade me to leave the country, and puts money on the table while I’m deciding whether to give up whatever legal claims I have left, I’m going to need another word. Calling that “choice” doesn’t magically turn the power imbalance into a fucking coin toss.

And when the person being asked to make that choice is a child who came to this country without a parent or legal guardian, we should be well beyond normal immigration politics. You can support deportation, demand stricter borders, hate illegal immigration, and still recognize that putting government money into the equation while a kid decides whether to abandon an immigration case requires a hell of a lot more scrutiny than DHS seems interested in giving it. Federal law itself gives unaccompanied children special procedures precisely because they are children and because trafficking, exploitation, and unsafe repatriation are recognized risks. Federal law specifically requires procedures addressing those risks and gives many unaccompanied children access to removal proceedings and counsel.

Now the Trump administration wants to make this operation considerably bigger.

According to PunchUp’s review of an August 7 DHS draft contract, the government is seeking approval for a follow-on version of Project Homecoming worth as much as $2.3 billion, compared with the $915 million ceiling on the original contract. The 52-page draft reportedly calls for enrollment teams inside 35 detention facilities, roaming “rover” teams that can be sent elsewhere, and stipend payments for people who agree to leave. PunchUp reports that contractors would be expected to enroll as many as 36 detainees per facility per day. PunchUp

And buried inside those 52 pages is the part that should make every decent person put the fucking coffee down.

THE KIDS GET ONE SENTENCE

PunchUp reports that the draft contract contains exactly one reference to unaccompanied children. It says that, for those children, contractors should issue stipends “only to Government-designated adult recipients.” The draft, according to the reporting, does not explain in that section who those adults are, how they are selected, what relationship they must have to the child, or what child-specific safeguards govern the payment. PunchUp

Read that again and appreciate just how fucking backwards it is.

Federal law governing unaccompanied children spends pages addressing trafficking, custody, legal proceedings, safe repatriation, access to counsel and the specialized needs of minors. The administration is contemplating a contract that could be worth $2.3 billion, and according to the draft reviewed by PunchUp, the special instruction dealing with money connected to unaccompanied children is essentially: give it to an adult designated by the government. Maybe DHS has an entirely sensible procedure in mind that simply isn’t spelled out there, but when children and money are involved, “maybe they have safeguards somewhere” is not remotely fucking good enough. 8 U.S.C. §1232 · PunchUp

A NOTE FROM OFF SCRIPT

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This didn’t begin last week. Last October, the administration began offering certain unaccompanied migrant children $2,500 to voluntarily return to their countries of origin, initially focusing on 17-year-olds while the broader policy covered children 14 and older. Reuters reported that payment came only after an immigration judge approved voluntary departure and the child returned home, which at least placed a judge in the process before the money changed hands. Reuters

That program was controversial from the start for a pretty obvious reason: $2,500 means something very different to a frightened teenager in government custody than it does to a bureaucrat writing a policy memo in Washington. Lawyers and child advocates warned that the offer could influence kids who might have asylum claims or other legal avenues they did not fully understand. The administration defended it as a voluntary option, which brings us right back to that tortured fucking word.

The White House has never exactly hidden the pressure built into Project Homecoming. Its own May 2025 fact sheet described the choice as leaving voluntarily with federal support and financial assistance or facing enforcement and penalties, and it announced a nationwide campaign warning people who remained about removal, prosecution, fines, wage garnishment, and property confiscation. It also directed an “aggressive deportation surge” involving thousands of additional officers. White House

Fine. Adults can hear an ugly government offer and make their own decisions about it.

Children are different.

That shouldn’t be a radical fucking proposition.

WHAT DOES “VOLUNTARY” MEAN IN DETENTION?

PunchUp says roughly half of the existing program’s voluntary participants enrolled only after being detained, and the proposed contract appears designed to institutionalize that approach by putting enrollment teams directly inside detention facilities. The draft reportedly calls for two-person teams operating at 35 facilities, plus roaming teams deployed wherever DHS wants additional enrollment capacity. That is considerably more aggressive than putting an app online and waiting for somebody to click “yes.” PunchUp

The government can insist these departures remain voluntary, and technically a person may still sign the form himself. But coercion does not require somebody to grab your hand and force the pen across the paper. When one side controls your custody, your living conditions, your legal predicament, and increasingly the machinery designed to persuade you to leave, the word voluntary deserves more examination than DHS putting quotation marks around nothing and calling it a day.

The administration is also building the infrastructure to move families and children out more quickly. The Associated Press reported last month that ICE planned a 528-bed facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, beside a major deportation-flight hub, that could hold families and unaccompanied children during final preparations for departure. ICE described it as a temporary “staging area,” while planning documents reviewed by AP said the people there would remain in ICE legal custody and could be released only at ICE’s direction. Associated Press

Put these pieces together, and the picture becomes difficult to ignore. There is money for departure, contractors recruiting people, dedicated detention-facility enrollment teams, mobile recruiting units, and now physical infrastructure designed to stage families and children near deportation flights. You can call every individual component administrative efficiency if that helps you sleep better, but eventually enough pieces form a fucking system.

“IT LOOKS AND FEELS A LOT LIKE HUMAN TRAFFICKING”

That was Sharma-Crawford’s reaction when PunchUp showed her the terms. She also described the government’s approach as “peddling in human life for money,” while Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, called targeting children under the contract “gross and un-American.” Those are judgments, not findings of law, but neither sounds especially hysterical after you read what the draft reportedly says. PunchUp

I’m not going to tell you DHS is trafficking children because I cannot prove that, and outrage is not a substitute for evidence. I am going to tell you that when an experienced immigration lawyer reads a government deportation contract involving children, cash, and government-designated adult recipients and her mind goes to human trafficking, the appropriate response from the rest of us is not to shrug and change the fucking channel. The appropriate response is to demand every safeguard, every definition, every payment rule, and every line of oversight before one dime moves.

And I want to know something else.

Who exactly is looking out for the kid while all of this “choice” is happening?

Federal law recognizes that unaccompanied children may be trafficking victims, may fear persecution, and may qualify for immigration relief, and it requires procedures intended to protect them from exploitation. The Office of Refugee Resettlement says children in its custody have access to legal services in immigration proceedings, while federal law requires most unaccompanied children apprehended at the border to be transferred to HHS custody and provides specific procedures for their cases. That legal architecture exists because Congress understood something DHS’s contract writers appear to have misplaced somewhere around page 51: children are not little adults. Federal law · Office of Refugee Resettlement

They’re kids.

Some of them are scared. Some may have legitimate claims to stay here, some may not, some may ultimately have to return home, and none of those possibilities justifies treating the decision like a fucking sales conversion metric.

THIS DOESN’T REQUIRE OPEN BORDERS

Here is where somebody will inevitably scream that I want every migrant child admitted permanently into the United States. No, I fucking don’t, and nothing I’ve written here says that. Countries have borders, immigration laws have consequences, asylum claims can be denied, and people, including minors under appropriate legal procedures, can ultimately be required to leave.

What I am saying is considerably simpler. When the United States government deals with a child who arrived here alone, the first question should be whether that child is safe and receiving the legal process Congress gave him, not whether a contractor hit today’s enrollment target. And if money is part of the decision to leave, the government owes the public an extraordinarily clear explanation of who receives that money, why, under what authority, and with what protections against coercion or exploitation.

We shouldn’t need a fucking focus group to agree on that.

THE RECORD

THE NEW CONTRACT: PunchUp reports that DHS’s August 7 draft seeks a follow-on Project Homecoming contract worth up to $2.3 billion, substantially above the existing contract’s $915 million ceiling. The proposal includes detention-center enrollment teams and mobile units used to recruit additional participants. Bids are reportedly due September 2. PunchUp

THE CHILDREN: The draft reportedly contains a provision saying stipends connected to unaccompanied children should be issued only to “Government-designated adult recipients.” PunchUp reports that the 52-page document contains no other child-specific safeguards or standards. DHS told The Daily Beast it would be inappropriate to comment while the award process is underway.

THE EARLIER PAYMENT: In October 2025, the administration began offering certain unaccompanied migrant children $2,500 to voluntarily return home. The policy covered children 14 and older and initially focused on 17-year-olds, with payment made after an immigration judge approved departure and the child returned. Immigration advocates warned that money could pressure vulnerable children into surrendering claims they might otherwise pursue. Reuters

THE LAW: Federal law gives unaccompanied children protections specifically addressing trafficking, safe repatriation, custody and access to immigration proceedings. For most unaccompanied children who are not from contiguous countries, DHS must place them into removal proceedings if it seeks to remove them, and the law provides access to counsel and recognizes their specialized needs. That does not guarantee a child the right to remain in America, but it sure as hell means the process is supposed to be more complicated than handing somebody a check. 8 U.S.C. §1232

THE INFRASTRUCTURE: ICE is preparing a new 528-bed Louisiana facility near a major deportation-flight hub for families and unaccompanied children preparing to leave the country. ICE calls it a staging area rather than a detention center, but records obtained by AP say those housed there remain in ICE legal custody. Advocates worry that stays intended to last days could stretch longer. Associated Press

My problem here isn’t that the government wants immigration cases resolved. My problem is that we keep building systems where speed, detention capacity, contractor performance, and deportation numbers can become institutional priorities while the person caught in the machinery becomes an abstraction. When that person is fourteen fucking years old, abstraction isn’t good enough.

If the administration believes this is humane, show us the safeguards. If the departure is truly voluntary, show us how coercion is prevented. And if a government-designated adult is receiving money connected to a child’s departure, tell the American public who the fuck that adult is and why.

Until then, I have a hard time accepting “choice” as anything more than a very convenient word.

FROM OFF SCRIPT: THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR

The Campaign Ad That Invented a Surgery Position

A Byron Donalds-aligned ad claimed Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee David Jolly supports “gender-changing surgeries on kids,” using a clip in which Jolly said, “We embraced it.” The full recording shows Jolly was recounting someone else’s words about a family seeking gender-affirming care for a transgender grandchild, and he never mentioned surgery; PolitiFact rated the claim False. Culture-war advertising is apparently much easier when you edit out the part where the candidate isn’t saying the thing you need him to say. PolitiFact

Iran Has Not Been “Essentially Denuclearized”

Trump claimed this week that his administration had achieved the “essential Denuclearization of Iran.” Nuclear specialists interviewed by PolitiFact say Iran still controls highly enriched uranium and likely retains advanced centrifuges or components, meaning its nuclear capability has been damaged but not erased; inspectors currently lack full access, which adds uncertainty rather than proof of denuclearization. There is a fairly substantial fucking difference between we hurt the program badly and mission accomplished. PolitiFact

Yes, Drug Prices Fell. No, Trump Can’t Claim All the Credit.

Federal data show prescription drug prices fell 0.8 percent in July and 3.1 percent from a year earlier, which is genuinely good news. Trump says his drug deals and TrumpRx deserve the credit, but experts told AP that Biden-era Medicare negotiation rules, increased generic and biosimilar competition, and other factors may be more important, while some of Trump’s newest policies have barely begun taking effect. Give the administration credit where it earns it, but putting your name on the fucking victory lap doesn’t mean you ran the whole race. Associated Press

The Reflecting Pool Vandals Who Apparently Weren’t Vandals

Trump repeatedly blamed vandals for damage to the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, even after the Justice Department moved to dismiss a criminal case because new evidence showed the damage resulted from a botched installation and a rushed construction schedule. AP also found that Trump’s claims about the project’s cost, timing, and spending by previous administrations were wrong or misleading. When your own Justice Department says the evidence killed the vandalism theory, continuing to insist on vandals isn’t toughness — it’s just refusing to let the fucking facts interrupt a perfectly good story. Associated Press

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ONE QUESTION BEFORE YOU GO

Forget whether you support tougher immigration enforcement for a minute. Can a deportation decision made by an unaccompanied child in government custody after money has been offered ever truly be called voluntary? I want to know where you draw that line.

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