Everything's deteriorating in America, even Trump

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The news, in brief …

• CBS announces end of Colbert’s “Late Show”

  The host and the franchise will go off the air in May. Read more.

• Senate votes to defund public media

  All but two Senate Republicans voted to strip previously approved funding from PBS and NPR. Read more.

• Trump hands over Medicaid data to ICE

  The move was sold as a way to help deport undocumented immigrants, who can not apply for Medicaid. Read more.

• Americans believe Trump has done more harm than good

  Two new polls found that Americans believe Trump's policies have been detrimental to their lives. Read more.

• Fuentes calls MAGA a “scam” following Epstein “cover-up”

  The Neo-Nazi podcaster and Mar-a-Lago dinner guest is the latest far-right media figure to turn on Trump. Read more.

• Sen. Wyden presses DOJ to release Epstein bank reports to Congress

  The Oregon Democrat says banks flagged over $1.5 billion in suspicious Epstein transactions. Read more.

• Pelosi calls Epstein controversy “a distraction”

  These people can’t even gloat right. Read more.

Make me smarter …

Haunted by Epstein, Trump spirals further out of control

A perverted man from the grave is haunting Donald Trump. While it’s just the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein, he is in a very real sense Jacob Marley to Trump’s Ebenezer Scrooge. Read more.

Rotten to the core

America has been falling apart since Benjamin Franklin dropped that smug one-liner at the close of the Constitutional Convention.

Every new generation believes that theirs will be the one that finally sees the United States tear itself apart. (One of them, admittedly, was right.) Wars, riots, market runs and natural disasters all put people in mind of the The Big One, the day when the country will crumble in such a way that it can’t be rebuilt. With all due respect to those former generations, and the full knowledge that this will likely look ridiculous in retrospect, the deterioration of the United States has rarely been more literal than what we see in 2025.

Half of the United States lives in booming Sun Belt towns that creep out along rapidly aging highways and bridges, plopping drywall and sticks into the mud of some of the most humid and disaster-prone areas in the country. The politicians who represent these boomtowns only get more averse to infrastructure upkeep and necessary maintenance as their constituent populations swell with Republicans fleeing the property tax regimes of the high-paying parts of the country that allowed them to retire. Faced with endless traffic, pockmarked roads and paranoid neighbors, they sit inside and let Jesse Watters tell them its the other half’s fault that they don’t see their friends and family anymore. When The Big One comes, they’ll be left to their own devices by a hollowed-out federal government.

The little that does get built is intentionally shoddy, meant only to hold up long enough for the Harvard-educated Harold Hills to make a name and skip town for a Republican administration in Washington, D.C. Take Alligator Alcatraz, for example. This concentration camp-cum-publicity stunt is a series of tents in the most flood-prone corner of a nearly underwater state. As you might expect, conditions at the detention center already miserable just weeks after it opened. That doesn’t matter, it’s meant to be a multi-million dollar photo op for Gov. Ron DeSantis and he’s already back in Tallahassee.

And what else could we expect from our politicians? The average senator is eligible for Social Security and the senior leadership in Congress is even older. The country is run by people who bought their first home in the Nixon administration and their decrepit politics reflect that. The Democrats’ chance to sink the president’s extremely unpopular bill was stymied by the fact that three of their House reps. have died in office since January. Former President Joe Biden was the oldest man to ever be president. Trump will be even older when (if?) his term ends.

Given all that, it’s no wonder that Trump’s doctor expects us to swallow the line that he’s in excellent health, despite his visible bruising and obvious mental decline. White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt went so far as to say the bruising on his hands was caused by aspirin and handshakes. If Trump’s bedridden with pneumonia, expect them to say he got mono from kissing too many babies.

In short, our decaying government is run by a dying man whose trying to navigate American decline by killing the government. The people who are trying to stop him all have one eye on Trump and the other on the tall, thin man in a robe in the corner of their room. When The Big One comes, none of these people will be here, but they can take solace in the fact that they were the last members of U.S. Congress.

What do you think? Is the United States really cooked this time? Will a 62-year-old spring chicken rise from the ranks to put us back on the right path? Sound off in the comments.

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Standing Room Only …

This week’s Standing Room only is a celebration of you, Salon readers! Amanda Marcotte takes a look at what the peanut gallery has to say and discusses some of your best comments. (Speaking of, you can totally comment on this very newsletter to let us know what you think — nudge, nudge — just click the speech bubble.)

Before you go …

Like me, DOJ whistleblower Erez Reuveni followed the law

Public service does not mean "signing up to lie" for Donald Trump and Pam Bondi. Read more.