The Rose Garden Is Dead

As Trump paves democracy for profit, foreign wars burn, ICE cashes in, data gets rigged, and one Senate rule keeper quietly holds the line.

Good morning! The Rose Garden is gone. Paved over. Concrete poured where once flowers bloomed, because apparently what America needed in this dark chapter was a permanent Mar-a-Lago gift shop annex at the White House. Trump, true to form, has decided that even the physical symbols of democracy must be replaced with his personal branding opportunities. And if the rumors circulating are accurate, the space may soon house a Trump mega-shop, peddling Trump Bibles, Trump guitars, Trump phones, and whatever else his grifter dynasty can slap a logo onto before the next federal indictment lands.

This image of institutional destruction is the perfect staging ground for where we find ourselves this morning: a regime collapsing into farce, corruption, and genuine danger. As the Middle East teeters on the brink of a wider war, Donald Trump has fully sidelined his own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, because her sworn testimony inconveniently contradicted his nuclear scare-mongering. When pressed on why he won’t listen to his own DNI, Trump shrugged and declared, “She’s wrong. I don’t trust her.” Which is an interesting management philosophy, given that he hand-picked her for the job.

Meanwhile, war planning doesn’t exactly burden Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Instead, Hegseth has been busy at the Pentagon smashing watermelons for TikTok likes with a NASCAR driver, Ross Chastain, while Israeli missiles scream toward Tehran. The White House has cut off operational contact with the Defense Department. In its place, Trump has constructed a national security council comprising Netanyahu, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio. Trump relegated the rest of the apparatus to irrelevance or scapegoat duty, depending on the hour.

This would all be absurd enough, but Trump’s personal media habits add a particularly deranged color to the tableau. Holed up at Bedminster, between rounds of golf, he floods Truth Social with increasingly unhinged rants that read like rejected Unabomber drafts. He’s attacking Jerome Powell (again), calling him a “numb skull,” demanding interest rates be slashed to 1%, and insisting that only his magnificent tariffs can save the economy. All this while insisting inflation is non-existent, a curious claim given that the actual cost of ground beef is now brushing up against $6 a pound. But that’s irrelevant in Trump’s universe, where data itself has become an expendable enemy.

And indeed, the data itself is under siege. As exposed this week, Trump’s regime has systematically purged federal data analysts who aggregate core economic indicators, meaning that roughly a third of CPI calculations are now based on political guesswork. This allows the regime to hand wave away the pain Americans see at grocery stores and gas pumps with cheerful official numbers that bear no relation to reality. The economic gaslight presidency is fully operational.

At home, Trump’s Gestapo-in-training ICE agents continue their public theater raids, storming flea markets, parking lots, and even Dodger Stadium parking areas, though the Dodgers themselves denied them entry, much to MAGA’s rage. In one grotesque scene, federal agents violently arrested a Walmart employee who dared to interfere as they dragged a migrant street cleaner into custody. The message is clear: They criminalize dissent, punish community solidarity, and maintain the spectacle of domination.

But the real prize isn’t just the street theater, it’s the money. As ICE raids escalate and detention centers fill up, Trump’s campaign donors are cashing in. Lucrative no-bid contracts to house migrants rounded up in Trump’s immigration sweeps were quietly given to private prison companies, many of which had donated millions to his reelection campaign. These are the same firms that helped bankroll his rise in 2016 and have now positioned themselves as essential partners in his second-term purge. What began as a political stunt has metastasized into a full-blown detention-industrial complex, one that profits directly from the misery inflicted on immigrant communities. This is a business model rather than immigration policy.

The same perverse logic extends to Trump’s foreign policy delusions. In the past 72 hours, he has congratulated himself for a peace deal between Rwanda and the Congo, a deal that, according to every relevant African foreign ministry, he had precisely nothing to do with. Even India’s government felt compelled to publicly correct Trump’s fabricated claims he brokered de-escalation between India and Pakistan. Still, Pakistan’s authoritarian government, which has invested millions into Trump family crypto ventures, has conveniently offered to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. The same Pakistan that harbored bin Laden now serves as Trump’s personal awards committee. The grotesque irony practically writes itself.

And while Trump buries inconvenient facts beneath his mountain of fantasy, Putin offers a grim glimpse of where this trajectory leads when authoritarianism reaches its more mature stages. As President Zelensky revealed this morning, Russia has disguised its own battlefield dead as Ukrainian soldiers during prisoner exchanges, quietly returning bodies with Russian passports and military IDs to conceal its staggering losses from the domestic population. The Russian public, Zelensky explained, must be shielded from the true scale of slaughter lest it complicate future mobilizations. For Putin, as for Trump, truth is merely an obstacle to be circumvented.

The war in Ukraine has become a vast laboratory for authoritarian callousness. Nearly five million acres of Ukraine’s forests have burned since 2022, set ablaze by artillery shells, missiles, and land mines that continue to litter the countryside like hidden time bombs. Entire ecosystems are being reduced to moonscapes of blackened stumps and toxic soil. Ukrainian foresters now risk their lives conducting demining operations, moving square meter by square meter to prevent future infernos, while American AI startups develop mine-detection systems using drone technology. The slow, dangerous process of mapping and reclaiming this devastated landscape may take decades, assuming the war ever ends.

Trump, of course, cares nothing for such consequences. The burning forests of Ukraine are someone else’s problem. His only real environmental project is the concrete slab poured over the Rose Garden, a fitting monument to his legacy of demolition, vanity, and fraud.

As American institutions fracture under the weight of his second act, the parallels between Trump’s domestic authoritarian grift and Putin’s militarized nightmare grow harder to ignore. Neither cares for the people crushed beneath their ambitions. Both prefer manufactured fantasies over empirical reality. And both demand a loyalty that requires the willful suspension of observable truth.

And yet, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Senate, one small act of democratic immune response flickered this week. The Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, a career technocrat, unelected, unassuming, armed only with a red pen and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Byrd Rule, quietly gutted key provisions buried in Trump’s latest legislative monstrosity. Provisions that would have defunded the Federal Reserve, crippled the Office of Financial Statistics, and eliminated oversight of public accounting standards, all surgically sliced out for violating reconciliation rules. Trump had tried, once again, to turn financial governance into his personal vendetta machine. And the Parliamentarian simply said no.

It’s not a revolution. It’s not even news for most Americans. But in an era where entire agencies buckle under executive tantrums, where law enforcement serves campaign donors, and where forests burn for the vanity of tyrants, even this small bureaucratic victory serves as a reminder that a functioning democracy survives on the mundane courage of rule keepers. For now, Elizabeth Mac Donough is still standing. And for now, at least, the machinery of objective truth, economic data, monetary policy, and financial oversight, still sputters forward despite the wrecking ball in the White House.

The American collapse project continues. The Rose Garden is dead, and the grift lives on, and somewhere, in a quiet Senate office, one woman with a red pen is all that stands between the republic and total farce.