The Lincoln Logue — May 19th-23rd
Four days of autocracy. One day of plutocracy. Just another week in Trump’s America.
This week felt like we’d been dragged into a remake of a late-stage empire drama — where the dialogue is head-spinning, the stakes are apocalyptic, and the main character can’t stop (badly) improvising. From the Supreme Court legalizing mass deportation by executive whim, to Trump announcing a gold-plated missile shield that sounds like something brainstormed while using his gold-plated toilet, the week gave us plenty of evidence that the farce is now fully fused with the function.
Don Jr. floated the idea of running for president one day — because of course he did — and Trump used a diplomatic meeting with South Africa’s president to stage a globally televised power play, complete with racist undertones and authoritarian glee. And just when it felt like it couldn’t get worse, House Republicans capped it all off with a tax bill that reads like it was ghostwritten by a Mar-a-Lago hedge fund manager.
Welcome back to The Lincoln Logue, your weekly breakdown of the chaos, corruption, and coordinated gaslighting of Trump’s second term — with receipts, strategy, and a refusal to normalize the abnormal.
Monday, May 19 — Supreme Court Greenlights Mass Deportation of Venezuelans
▌When cruelty becomes precedent, the courts don’t need to shout — they just quietly sign the order.
The Supreme Court began the week by silently unleashing one of the most sweeping immigration rollbacks in modern history. With an unsigned order, the conservative majority gave the Trump administration the go-ahead to strip Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from over 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants — a humanitarian safeguard originally granted under Biden.
In plain terms, this means families who’ve legally lived, worked, and payed taxes in the U.S. for years — many fleeing political collapse and violence — are now back on ICE’s radar. They’re suddenly at risk of deportation, not because anything changed in Venezuela, but because Trump and Kristi Noem decided these people no longer “fit” into their immigration vision (the vision being white nationalism).
Civil rights groups called it “shocking,” and with good reason: this is the largest single act of immigration status revocation in U.S. history. And it wasn’t even debated — just rubber-stamped on the shadow docket. A lower court had blocked the deportations over concerns of racial animus. Now, that safeguard is gone, and the administration is free to act.
The cruelty isn’t the side effect. It’s the point.
Source: NBC News