Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching wildfire smoke turn the sky over half the country the color of a nicotine stain, three US service members died in a war the President keeps insisting he ended, ICE shot two more men and the White House told the mourners to keep it down, Trump went on primetime to reveal China stole the 2020 election, the Secretary of Defense turned military jets strafing a public beach into policy, and a senator’s been missing so long his own party thinks his proof-of-life photo is a deepfake. Let’s start with the war Trump keeps ending.

Three American service members are dead this weekend, two in Jordan and one in Iraq, defending against Iranian missiles and drones, with one still missing. That’s sixteen troops dead now in a war Donald Trump has declared over so many times he’s earned a signing-ceremony punch card. He signed the latest ceasefire last month, held the pen up like he’d cured cancer, told you it was finished, and this week Iran’s Supreme Leader reviewed that signature and called it, “worthless.” Trump spent the week bombing civilian bridges and ports, Iranian missiles are landing on oil fields in Kuwait, and this morning he ordered fresh strikes to “swiftly punish” the country he keeps attacking. Asked about the dead Americans, he said it was “a very sad thing,” the way you’d mention a rained-out barbecue. He keeps announcing peace and ordering airstrikes in the same breath, and it’s other people’s kids who come home in the boxes.

At home, ICE spent the week shooting people. On July 7 in Houston they killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man they’ve admitted they mistook for someone else. On July 13 in Biddeford, Maine, they killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. And spare me whether they had the right guy, since no name on a warrant turns shooting an unarmed man at a traffic stop into anything but a killing. None of it was on camera, either. Congress gave ICE the money for body cameras and ICE spent it on anything else, a real stroke of luck for the people holding the guns. Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary finally paused most vehicle stops to slow the body count, but that only lasted about a day before the Orange menace overruled his own secretary on Truth Social and posted “keep those Crime Stat Records coming,” about human beings his agents are shooting. Then border czar Tom Homan went on Fox to explain whose fault the killings really are. Not the agents. Not the guns. The people who said the killing was bad. His message to anyone upset that ICE keeps killing civilians was to “shut their mouth” or there’ll be “more bloodshed.” I’m sorry? Are you threatening to unlawfully kill people for speaking out about you unlawfully killing people? What the actual feck?

Then Trump commandeered primetime to whine yet again the 2020 election was stolen by China. a story his own intelligence agencies looked at and threw back. He declassified a fat stack of documents that turned out to be five-year-old news in a fresh binder. He waved around 278,000 noncitizen voters that officials in Nevada and Pennsylvania read once and set on fire. And he slurred through all of it at the speed of a man deflating, ranting about a “shadow government” while attacking CISA, the election-security agency his own administration runs, the one that called 2020 the most secure election in American history. My dude, you keep warning us about the shadow government. You are the shadow government. He’s oh for sixteen in court trying to pry loose the state voter rolls, so now he’s writing the excuse months early, that if Republicans lose the midterms, it was stolen. He’s pre-drafting the tantrum.

On July 15 the Blue Angels screamed over a packed Pensacola Beach so low that lawn chairs took flight and people dove into the sand, a maneuver the military calls reckless and this administration files under content. The Navy opened a safety review. But hairgel hegseth, looked at fighter jets f