The modern history of diplomacy is usually written in treaties, summits, and carefully worded communiqués hammered out by people who know the difference between a demilitarized zone and a zoning variance. But the history of the second Trump administration is being written in term sheets. On November 21, 2025, the world learned exactly what happens when you outsource the fate of a sovereign European nation to a golf buddy and a hedge fund manager.

The wind in the high desert of Victorville, California, blows with a specific, sand-blasting indifference. It strips the paint off cars and the hope off human beings with equal efficiency. In this desolate landscape sits the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, a facility that sounds like a place where one might go to renew a driver’s license or file a tax return.

The central crisis of American life is not that we are spending too much money on avocado toast. It is not that the government is printing too much cash to fund "woke" library books. It is not even the terrifying prospect that a drag queen might read a story to a child in a public space. The central crisis, the one that is actively eating the foundation of the country like termites in a log cabin, is that we have built the wealthiest civilization in the history of the known universe, and almost all of that money has been vacuumed up by a microscopic sliver of people who have convinced the rest of us that the reason we are broke is because of the single mother buying formula with a SNAP card in front of us at the grocery store.

It has been seven years since a twenty-eight-year-old bartender from the Bronx looked at the decaying edifice of the Queens Democratic machine, ordered a seltzer, and then proceeded to bulldoze the entire building. We all remember the shock of 2018. We remember the "AOC phenomenon," a phrase used by consultants to describe something they hoped was a fever dream. But here we are in late 2025, and the fever hasn't broken.

There is a specific genre of political theater that plays out in the unspoken spaces of a marriage, a silent drama usually reserved for the frantic final act of a melodramatic screenplay. But recently, that drama has spilled out onto the campaign trail and into the glossy pages of People magazine, centering on the ring finger of Usha Vance. The official story, deployed with the frantic casualness of a PR team trying to put out a grease fire with a wet towel, is that the Second Lady’s missing wedding ring is a non-story.

The lights went down in the theater, and for a brief moment, the collective anxiety of the world—the elections, the economy, the general sense that we are living in the final season of a poorly written reality show—suspended itself in the dark. I sat there with Matthew, my fiance and designated emotional anchor, and our friend Tasi, flanked by popcorn and the specific, vibrating anticipation that only comes when you are about to witness a cultural monolith attempt to justify its own existence.

The frantic energy currently radiating from the Texas Governor’s Mansion is not the result of a grid emergency or a sudden concern for the welfare of the state’s foster children. It is the specific, high-pitched frequency of political desperation. On November 20, the state’s leadership, spearheaded by Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, formally hit the panic button. They have rushed to the United States Supreme Court with a filing that reads less like a legal argument and more like a hostage note, begging Justice Samuel Alito for an emergency administrative stay.

There is a specific, heavy silence that settles over the internet when the gambling stops being fun and starts being mathematical. You can feel it in the sudden drop in laser-eye profile pictures on social media. You can hear it in the absence of "Have Fun Staying Poor" tweets. It is the sound of a bubble hissing as the air leaves the room, replaced by the cold, hard vacuum of realized losses.

For the last two years, OpenAI has not really been a technology company. It has been a theology. It operated on the collective faith that if we just fed enough money and electricity into the black box, a digital god would emerge to solve cancer, climate change, and the burden of writing email subject lines. This theological immunity allowed them to operate above the petty concerns of copyright law, financial solvency, and basic safety protocols.

If you want to know the exact moment the American presidency dissolved from a functioning executive branch into a chemically unstable mood ring, you don't need to look at the nuclear codes or the classified briefings. You just need to look at Truth Social at 3:00 AM, where the Commander-in-Chief is currently debating whether it is more appropriate to arrest six sitting members of Congress or simply execute them for the crime of reading the instruction manual.

The simulation didn’t just glitch on November 21, 2025; it blue-screened, rebooted, and loaded a corrupted file from a different timeline. In the Oval Office, beneath the stern, oil-painted gaze of George Washington, the President of the United States sat next to the Mayor-elect of New York City. On paper, this should have been a cage match. In the blue corner, Zohran Mamdani: a 34-year-old democratic socialist, supporter of the BDS movement, and a man Trump had spent the last six months diagnosing as a "100% Communist Lunatic" and a "total nut job." In the red corner, Donald Trump: the architect of the deportation force, the bane of the "radical left," and a man Mamdani had recently diagnosed as a "fascist" and a "despot."

It is a rare and disorienting experience to watch a arsonist suddenly grab a fire hose, but here we are. On November 21, 2025, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—the woman who turned performative cruelty into a legislative brand strategy—announced her resignation from Congress. In a four-page statement and video that will likely be studied by future historians of political irony, she blasted the "political industrial complex," lamented the country’s decline, and framed her exit as a noble act of conscience.

The modern American Senator is a creature of profound, almost biological delicacy. They are capable of summoning a mob to the steps of the Capitol, feeding that mob a steady diet of existential dread and lies, and then, when the glass breaks and the tear gas clears, they are capable of weeping softly because someone looked at their phone bill. We are currently witnessing a spectacle of indignation from lawmakers who are shocked, simply shocked, that their communications on and around January 6 are being treated as evidence.

For decades, Larry Summers has functioned less as a human being and more as a sentient institution, a kind of granite monument to the neoliberal consensus that simply refuses to erode. He is the man who is always wrong but never fired, the failing up champion of the Western world who managed to wreck the deregulation of the banks, fumble the response to the Great Recession, and infuriate half the population of Harvard, only to be rewarded with a permanent seat at the high table of global power.

The intellectual architecture of the modern American right wing is built on a foundation of very specific, load-bearing misunderstandings, but none is quite as structural as their inability to distinguish between a democratic socialist and a Soviet commissar. To Donald Trump and the ecosystem that orbits him, there is no difference between wanting to fund the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and wanting to liquidate the kulaks.

The political theater of the last week has been a masterclass in the art of the pivot. We watched the Trump administration spend months fighting the Epstein Files Transparency Act with the desperate energy of a man trying to hold a door shut against a rising flood. They called it a "Democrat hoax," a distraction, a waste of time. Then, the moment the vote count in the House became a mathematical inevitability, the script flipped.

The moral arch of the universe does not bend toward justice. It bends toward the highest bidder, and on November 18, 2025, the gavel finally came down on the sale. The rehabilitation of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was completed not in a shadow court or a backroom deal, but under the bright, unforgiving lights of the Oval Office, where President Donald Trump hosted the autocrat for his first visit since the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

The carcass of Warner Bros. Discovery is currently twitching on the auction block, and the sharks are circling with the dead-eyed precision of algorithms that have already decided your subscription price is too low. It is a scene of grim corporate inevitability, a garage sale of American culture where the items on offer are not dusty lawnmowers but the entire back catalog of HBO, the broadcasting rights to the NBA, and the beleaguered soul of a news network that the President of the United States treats as a personal punching bag.

The Month That Never Was: How the Government Just Deleted Your Job Loss From History The official story of the American economy is no longer a narrative of numbers or a collection of data points. It has become a theological exercise. On November 19, 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics made history in the quietest, most devastating way possible. They did not release a bad report.

The federal government has always been a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, but typically the people in charge try to hide the duct tape. On November 18, 2025, Education Secretary Linda McMahon decided to rip the tape off, dismantle the machine, and sell the parts to the neighbors. In what can only be described as the bureaucratic equivalent of an estate sale conducted by arsonists, the Trump administration announced six "interagency agreements" that effectively gut the U.S.

The modern history of diplomacy is usually written in treaties, summits, and carefully worded communiqués. But the history of the Trump administration is written in term sheets. On November 19, 2025, the world learned exactly what happens when you outsource geopolitics to a real estate developer and a sovereign wealth fund manager. The Guardian revealed that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy and golf buddy, and Kirill Dmitriev, a Kremlin adviser who treats state sovereignty like a distressed asset, have quietly drafted a twenty-eight point "peace plan" for Ukraine.

We need to retire the word “economy.” We need to take it out back, behind the woodshed of political discourse, and bury it next to “trickle-down” and “compassionate conservatism.” It has become a linguistic shield, a hollow propaganda term used by CNBC anchors and politicians to gaslight you into believing that your inability to buy groceries is a personal failure rather than a systemic feature.

The political class has spent months trying to perform an elaborate magic trick: make the entirety of the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein disappear. They called the push for public disclosure a "hoax," then a partisan attack, then a distraction. Yet, the Epstein Files Transparency Act survived their calculated attempts at erasure, sailing through the House with a terrifying-to-them 427-1…

The contemporary political narrative often moves at a speed that blurs the lines between fact and fabrication, but rarely does it achieve the dizzying, nauseating velocity of the Trump administration’s internal policy on the “Epstein files.” What began as a solemn promise of transparency quickly dissolved into a spectacular display of gaslighting, denial, and panicked capitulation. The entire sequence, spanning from January’s opening overtures to the recent, humiliating 427-1 vote in the House, is not a policy timeline; it is an absurd message carousel that functions as Exhibit A for how the current administration treats objective reality—as a choose your own adventure, where the answer depends entirely on the proximity of the political threat.

The spectacle of Washington operating at speed, with overwhelming bipartisan agreement, is generally reserved for declaring war or giving tax breaks to billionaires. But this week, the gears of Congress ground forward with unnerving velocity to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. After months of calculated stonewalling from the usual suspects in Trump-world, the House of Representatives delivered a verdict that was less about justice and more about self-preservation, passing the measure with an astonishing…