Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children break up with him on his own app, the government stayed busy. This week, Trump is buying the midterms with your money, your ballot has a mail problem, measles is winning in Pennsylvania, border agents want your phone, the Justice Department is going after the judges who told it no, and a startup wants 456 nuclear reactors on your public land. Let’s get into it.

Trump Raids the Border for $20 Million in Ads About Trump

Donald Trump personally ordered his budget director to find taxpayer money for TV ads about how great Donald Trump is. The New York Times says it started at a meeting about funding Republican candidates, where he had an aide pull up videos of himself instead, including one with fighter jets flying over him.

So Russ Vought took $20 million from Customs and Border Protection and moved it into a budget line called “One Big Beautiful Bill Commemorative Events.” The border was such an emergency it could spare $20 million for a montage. Trump’s defense is:

“If somebody said that that’s wrong, I’ll gladly pay the money.”

Somebody said it, my dude. It’s federal law, which has banned spending taxpayer money on self-promotion for decades.

Then Friday night he announced $90 checks for about 20 million seniors, and he’s taking the money out of a fund Congress created to improve Medicare. The monthly premium is $202, so he bought your grandmother about two weeks. He’s bribing you with your own money and he’s not even tipping well.

Your Ballot Is in the Mail, and Hegseth Is Guarding It

The election is 30 days away, and the people in charge of it should make you nervous. Democracy Docket found tens of thousands of voters could lose their vote this year because of delays at the Postal Service. Slow mail, in a vote by mail election, under the president who hates vote by mail. What are the odds?

Meanwhile the Secretary of Defense announced that the N.S.A. and the military’s cybersecurity units will guard election systems, after Trump gutted the civilian agency built to do exactly that. They fired the election security experts and sent in Pete Hegseth, a man who texted war plans over an unsecured app with a reporter in the chat. He couldn’t keep a group chat secure, and now he’s got your ballot.

And when TIME asked Trump about using the Insurrection Act before the midterms, he said:

“I could use it. A lot of people think I should use it sometimes.”

A lot of people think I should get bangs. We don’t act on everything.

So don’t wait for Election Day. If your state has early voting, go vote in person. If you vote by mail, send it this week, or skip the mailbox and hand it to your county election office or an official drop box. If the post office is your only option, walk it inside and make them postmark it in front of you. Look up your options today, because the states making this hardest are counting on you to find out too late.

RFK Jr. Runs Health, Measles Runs Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has 943 measles cases and five people are dead, including two babies too young to get the shot. We eliminated this disease 26 years ago, before the iPod came out.

It came back on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s watch. He spent twenty years telling parents the shot was the danger, Trump put him in charge of the country’s health, and here we are. A county health director told the Guardian that residents walk up to her nurses saying they’ve heard the shot will make them sterile, or that it has a microchip in it. Nobody needs a microchip to track a man who posts on Facebook that he’s at Applebee’s.

It’s in 39 of the state’s 67 counties, and health officials in the rest say it’s a matter of time.

Feds Approve Him for Global Entry, Then Take His Phone

Border agents took an American citizen’s phone at Newark airport because he wouldn’t let them