Disclaimer

This is satire. No government officials were harmed in the making of this rant — unless you count their pride, credibility, and commitment to democracy. If you confuse satire with reality, that’s on reality for getting so damn close to parody.

You know your country’s in trouble when the National Guard shows up in D.C. not to protect the Constitution, not to respond to an attack, not even to fix potholes — but to spread mulch around cherry trees.

That’s not security. That’s stagecraft. That’s an authoritarian flex disguised as landscaping.

And while the troops are playing gardeners, Trump’s people are busy hollowing out the government like termites in a load-bearing wall.

Three hundred thousand federal jobs — gone. The largest cut since World War II. But don’t worry, the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE — yes, really) has it all handled. They outsourced the work to contractors, AI, and Elon Musk’s latest “efficiency” wet dream. Then somebody shoved 300 million Social Security numbers into an unsecured cloud server. Because nothing says efficiency like handing hackers the keys to everyone’s identity.

Meanwhile, FEMA? The agency that’s supposed to help Americans survive floods, hurricanes, fires? They’re bleeding staff and getting reassigned to ICE. That’s right — instead of saving you from the next Katrina, they’ll be checking papers at a wildfire. Ask the firefighters in Washington State — dragged off the fire line in handcuffs while the forest still burned. “You risked your life out here to save the community,” one said. “This is how they treat us.”

That’s not disaster relief. That’s disaster theater.

And don’t think public health is safe either. The CDC director refuses to rubber-stamp vaccine changes without asking experts — so Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tells her to resign. She doesn’t. Next thing you know, the White House fires her for being “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” Which is rich, considering their agenda seems to be dismantling the CDC like it’s IKEA furniture with missing screws.

Even the Fifth Circuit Court — a court so far right it thinks Attila the Hun was soft on crime — had to step in and tell Louisiana, “Your congressional maps are too racist.” Think about that. When the 5th Circuit says you’ve gone too far, you’ve basically run out of right-wing. You’ve looped back around into parody.

It’s all the same playbook:

• Starve the city budget, then say the city is failing.
• Slash the civil service, then claim government doesn’t work.
• Turn disaster response into immigration raids.
• Fire experts and call it “alignment.”
• Control the trains, the stations, the flow of people — Union Station as a trophy case for authoritarianism.

This isn’t government. This is humiliation as policy. They’re not fixing America, they’re breaking it in public so you know they can. Mulching cherry trees with the Guard. Handcuffing firefighters in front of their crews. Forcing public servants to choose between silence and exile.

It’s not about efficiency. It’s not about safety. It’s about showing everyone — from D.C. to Louisiana to the Olympic National Forest — that loyalty to the regime matters more than survival.

And here’s the kicker: it’s working exactly as designed. Fear in the agencies. Distrust in the streets. People second-guessing whether their vote, their job, their house, or their very life is safe from the next round of “beautification.”

So yeah, the fire’s still burning. The trees are still mulched. The maps are still rigged. And the cages are never full enough.

Because in Trump’s America, the goal isn’t to govern. The goal is to grind you down until you mistake authoritarianism for normalcy.