When you give bad people power, bad things happen. Corruption blooms like algae. Everything gets polluted. And the steamroller of fascism keeps moving along.
Here's an update on a few of the people making the worst abuses of Trump 2.0 happen.
Todd Blanche
During his tenure at DOJ, Trump's former criminal lawyer has not only participated in new crimes for Trump, he's also proven himself to be a good friend of Ghislaine Maxwell and a shameless protector of the Epstein Class.
Blanche recently endorsed the idea that child rapists should be able to choose the mothers of their children when he spoke of his desire to trample on states' rights and take abortion bans national.
Despite all the scandals and corruption tainting Blanche's nomination, the Senate GOP just chose to put itself on the "wrong side of history," confirming him as the nation's new Attorney General.
Markwayne Mullin
Following Kristi Noem's cruel, narcissistic, and disastrous tenure as head of DHS, Markwayne Mullin pledged to be more discreet about his department's atrocities. That plan fell apart in July when ICE killed three people in less than a week during July.
Each of the killings was horrific in its own right, exposing the lack of leadership, training, and accountability within immigration enforcement. One of the victims, 28-year-old, Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán, was in the U.S. on a valid tourist visa. The two others, 52 year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a business owner and father of two U.S. citizen sons who was working toward legal status, and 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Guerrero, who was granted a work permit by the Trump administration in 2025, were not even suspects that ICE was looking for.
Meanwhile, as reports of "deaths, hunger strikes, and the horrifying conditions" in ICE facilities continue to shame Mullin's department, the DHS secretary is seeking to add a new veil of secrecy by purchasing ICE detention facilities, giving CoreCivic, a private prison operator and major Trump donor, a $1.5 billion taxpayer windfall while continuing to contract the company to run Trump's deadly, worm-filled detention camps.
The deal will allow Mullin to make the mistreatment of detainees more discreet by "clamping down on the oversight of what goes on inside them."
Pete Hegseth
In recent weeks, Trump's "Secretary of War" has become the poster boy for the dangers of testosterone therapy and been cited as an inspiration for alleged domestic abuser and self-confessed testosterone injector Max Miller.
But Mr. High T turned into a finger-pointing wimp and blamed an underling when confronted by Trump about the U.S. army's extremely shrunken missile supply. Unfortunately for Hegseth, The Atlantic's Michael Scherer re-upped an April article that made clear "Hegseth has known about this issue for months."
Hegseth continues to embarrass himself, long after claiming a "historic and overwhelming victory" in the war against Iran after only six weeks. As CNN reported this week, he is now desperately crowdsourcing the troops for ideas about what to do to get out of the mess he's created.
And, thanks to Hegseth's incompetence, there's even more danger ahead if the Strait of Hormuz ever does reopen. Experts are now warning of the kind of "biological apocalypse" that will make us all long for the days when our biggest water worry was the algae in the Reflecting Pool.
The danger, reports ABC News, is that "prolonged stationary periods can lead to substantial biofouling on ships." The conditions and the types of organisms in the Strait of Hormuz — combined with the duration of the Strait's closure — create a unique challenge that may not be solved by standard approaches. Simply allowing container ships to start moving again, "could trigger a super-spreader event of invasive species as marine organisms attach to the idle vessels and get transported to other ecosystems around the world."
Lee Zeldin
It's bad enough that Pete Hegseth's incompetence is putting us all in environmental danger.
What's worse is that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is doing it on purpose.
What's even more disturbing is that before becoming Trump's anti-science hatchet man, "Sleazy Lee Z" was a moderate on the environment who testified that climate change was real.
Before he started promoting cancer-causing chemicals and finding stealthy ways to make the air we breathe more polluted, Zeldin was himself diagnosed with leukemia, a fate he is more than happy to bequeath upon Americans across the country — especially those in poor and minority communities — in his endless pursuit of wealth and power.
Elon Musk
Perhaps no one has benefitted as much from Lee Zeldin's embrace of poisoning Black communities — and the corruption of the Todd Blanche-era DOJ — than America's most famous Space Cowboy.
These days, Musk is not only killing sick and starving children on a daily basis, polluting U.S. communities, endangering wildlife, destroying fragile ecosystems, putting airline passengers in mortal danger, and your retirement savings in jeopardy. The world's first Porndog Trillionaire is also suing the state of Minnesota for the right to create AI images showing child sexual exploitation and people naked without their consent.
The new law has gone into effect this month. But there will be a hearing on August 19 where Musk's xAI will argue against it on First Amendment grounds.
Musk is continuing to fight for the right for Grok AI to produce child porn even after it was revealed last month that one man "had used Grok to create 7,000 sexually explicit images" of his stepdaughter based on a photo taken when she was 11 years old.
It wasn't until the man input a prompt that included the words "gang rape" that xAI’s child safety system took action.
In his efforts to stay above the law, Musk is now planning to spend at least $100 million to help Republicans in the midterms.
David Ellison
In an age of oligarchs, Nepo babies, and corruption, no family is embracing the possibilities of tech fascism more eagerly than the Ellisons.
Daddy Larry, the 81-year-old founder of Oracle, has long dreamed of turning the U.S. into the kind of surveillance society Orwell warned us about and China is busy perfecting.
Larry used his billions and his connection to Trump to engineer a corrupt deal to buy Paramount for his son David in 2025. It was a deal cemented with a $16 million bribe from CBS to Trump, the firing of Stephen Colbert, and the Bari Weiss-powered demolition of CBS News, including the brick-by-brick dismantling of flagship show 60 Minutes.
The plan to expand Trump's new Ministry of Propaganda further with a "horrifying" deal to buy Warner Brothers Discovery has currently been stalled by meddling state attorneys general and Oracle's plunging stock price.
But that didn't stop the Nepo CEO Ellison from putting his name to a New York Times op-ed on August 4 in which he argued for his right to buy CNN as well as CBS News and claimed, ludicrously, that he had no intention "to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views."
Back in the real world, the rest of us have watched in dismay as the Bari Weiss-led 60 Minutes has canceled fact-based reports on the Trump administration's use of El Salvador torture camps, attempted to justify the Minneapolis shootings of peaceful anti-ICE protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and edited a rambling and rant-filled interview with Trump to make it less embarrassing for Dear Leader,
"I believe that news should be based on facts and truth," wrote Ellison in the Times, a ridiculous thing to say weeks after fired 60 Minutes journalist Cecilia Vega's revelation that Bari Weiss had asked her to report things, "that never happened."
RFK, Jr.
There's a convincing case to be made that RFK, Jr. — as both a "Kennedy" and the leader of the MAHA movement — played a decisive role in the 2024 campaign.
It's definitely true that Trump delivered on at least one campaign promise to MAHA voters: He let Mr. Brainworm "go wild on health... on the food... on the medicines."
As a result, the number of Americans with explosive diarrhea, measles, an STI, or a pregnant teen in the household is way higher than the number who have been made healthy again.
In 2025, RFK, Jr. ensured that future outbreaks of the cyclospora parasite would be harder to track after he made it "optional" to report it and several other pathogens to FoodNet, the national foodborne-illness tracker. This week, U.S. cases of cyclospora topped 100,000 as the outbreak expanded to 47 states. (Trump recently responded to a Fox News question about lettuce with such a shit-eating grin that I was reminded how he literally gave pork producers the right to put feces in our food during his first term.)
Explosive diarrhea isn't the only thing to worry about in these times of RFK-led food safety. Nineteen million eggs were just recalled due to possible salmonella contamination. Frozen blueberries put you at risk for a E. coli infection. One brand of infant formula was recalled nationwide after four confirmed cases of botulism. Jalapenos have caused illnesses and hospitalizations in 27 states. And you may never eat meat and poultry when you read about the new rules that now put Trump donor profitability ahead of public (and worker) safety.
As the nation's measles outbreak worsened in 2025, RFK, Jr. promoted fake cures and misinformation instead of vaccines. Measles cases hit a 34-year-high in 2025. And have kept going up since.
When it comes to tracking sexually transmitted infections (STIs), such as drug-resistant gonorrhea, RFK, Jr. simply pulled the plug on the lab that oversaw the research and stored the samples. Maternal and congenital syphilis rates are continuing to surge across the U.S. And in 2026, a new STI, a fungal infection that causes "painful, coin-sized rashes on the arms, buttocks, trunk, legs, and genitals," is also spreading across the country.
Meanwhile, "sweeping grant cuts" are now hitting both Planned Parenthood and other organizations committed to preventing teens from getting pregnant and avoiding sexually-transmitted infections — as well as the sexual abstinence programs that conservatives used to pray would stop teenagers fucking.
In the summer of 2026, when it comes to public health, there's a lot to worry about.
But one thing is clear: RFK, Jr. remains Public Health Enemy #1.
Jeanine Pirro
While many on the left have treated Jeanine Pirro (aka "Judge Box of Wine") as figure of fun for years, since 2025 her ridiculous actions as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia have had serious consequences.
This week, the prosecutor who couldn't get a grand jury to indict the DC "sandwich guy" on a felony and then failed to get a jury to convict him on a misdemeanor, committed a serious abuse of power in obliging a federal judge to dismiss charges against nine of the Oath Boys — the most dangerous and organized leaders of the deadly January 6th insurrection — including the terrorist group's leader Stewart Rhodes.
For the past year, Pirro has treated her job as a performance intended to impress only Donald Trump, the same "audience of one" she previously spoke to through the TV as a Fox News host.
It's a performance that has brought disgrace to her office as, for months, she followed Trump's orders to pursue sham prosecutions against the likes of Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the six Democratic Congresspeople who made a video urged members of the military not to commit war crimes.
Pirro's willingness to wade in Trump's increasingly toxic, algae-infested DC swamp reached its limit in the case of the alleged Reflecting Pool vandal.
Pirro dropped the charges agains David Hearn and others earlier this month because even she had to admit the real villain was Trump's "pool guy."
But Trump isn't giving up.
He says Pirro "choked" and "folded like an umbrella" — and is still urging her to revisit the case and sending a clear message that if she doesn't, maybe he'll find someone who will.
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Previous "Bad People Updates": 2023, 2024, 2025
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