The Saturday Report 4/25/26 —What can be done about a sleep-deprived, paranoid 79-year-old w/the nuclear codes, awake at 3 am posting rage into a phone?

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion

— So, we’re back to firing squads. In the year 2026, the United States government has officially decided that lining up human beings and shooting them to death is an acceptable use of federal power, as Todd Blanche announced this week. And the loudest voices cheering it on are the same hypocrites who never shut up about being “pro-life.”
Joe Biden got this right when he suspended the federal death penalty, and he got it right for exactly the reason he said: he’s a Catholic, he’s a Christian, and he actually believes what those traditions teach about the dignity of human life.
The Catechism is not subtle on this. Pope Francis called the death penalty inadmissible, full stop. John Paul II spent years pleading with governors and presidents to spare condemned prisoners. When the government kills someone in our name, we’re part of it. Our tax dollars buy the bullets, our flag flies over the chamber, and our silence is the permission slip. It coarsens us, and drops us into the category of brutal dictatorships that routinely kill their own people. Strapping a man to a chair, shooting him, or pumping him full of chemicals while witnesses watch through glass, isn’t justice: it’s ritualized brutality.
Firing squads. In America. In 2026. G-d help us, because we are clearly not going to help ourselves.

— Trump’s approval rating and Americans’ economic sentiment collapse together. We’re not yet in a depression or even a recession, but 45 years of Reaganomics — gutted unions, frozen minimum wage, taxes on working people but not billionaires or giant corporations, jobs sent overseas, student debt, exploding medical and housing costs — have left people feeling like we are.
Trump promised to fix it. Instead, he’s made it so much worse that he’s set a record no president wants. His net approval on the economy has cratered to minus 32 — the lowest of any president at this point in any term in modern polling history. Biden, whom Trump mocked relentlessly on the economy, was at minus 25 — seven points better. George W. Bush, also minus 25. Jimmy Carter, the punching bag Trump has invoked for a decade, was at minus 22, a full 10 points better.
Trump entered his second term at plus six, elected because voters trusted him over Kamala Harris on the economy; that’s a nearly 40-point collapse in just over a year. Tariffs, chaos, family grifts, and billionaire giveaways are the economy he’s delivered, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better because of his blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Reagan built the trap. Trump inherited it, promised to smash it, and instead sprang it on the very suckers voters who elected him.

— Has Trump’s mental health deteriorated so badly he’s a danger to the world? Even his longtime friends are saying yes, now on national television. On Morning Joe Friday, Rev. Al Sharpton — who has known Trump for decades as contemporaries in New York City society — told co-host Jonathan Lemire that Americans should be worried about the president’s state of mind. The trigger: a 79-year-old president posting on Truth Social well after 2 a.m., only to resume again five hours later, ranting about prosecuting the Clintons and whatever else crossed his mind.
Sharpton called the behavior unstable, which is an understatement. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is doing a better job managing the White House than anyone did in term one, but as Sharpton put it, “they’re not containing him.” In the middle of the night, alone with his phone, the president can flip everything from policy to prosecutions to war. America now has a sleep-deprived, paranoid 79-year-old with the nuclear codes who’s awake at 2 a.m. posting rage into a phone and nobody can stop him. What could possibly go wrong? It’s long past time for Congress and his Cabinet to act.

— Brown skin, speak Spanish, even US citizens get deported by Trump’s ICE. Brian José Morales García, 25, was born in Denver and spent much of his life in Mexico where his family lived. When ICE picked him up during a “routine traffic stop” looking for brown-skinned people (now authorized by Pillsbury Doughboy/accused-rapist Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court), he begged to be allowed to go home to get his birth certificate and ID. They said no and shipped him to Mexico.
Here’s the kicker: no U.S. citizen is legally required to carry proof of citizenship while riding shotgun to a job site in Fredericksburg. Morales had his birth certificate, his Social Security card, and hospital records from the Denver hospital where he was born: his lawyer has them all. DHS still insists he’s lying and hasn’t bothered to explain away a single document. A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by ICE in just the first nine months of Trump’s second term. Morales is the first we know of who was actually deported. He won’t be the last.

— Trump continues to help Putin by coming up with ways to “punish” NATO allies as he tries to fracture the alliance. The Reuters-obtained memo, reportedly drafted by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, floats suspending Spain from NATO for refusing to let the U.S. use its Rota and Morón bases to strike Iran, and even includes reviewing the U.K.’s claim to the Falkland Islands, a gift-wrapped favor to Trump’s buddy Javier Milei in Argentina. NATO’s own charter has no mechanism for expelling a member, so this is pure vandalism. Every headline about Washington threatening Madrid or London is another night Putin sleeps well in the Kremlin.

— DeSantis wants to further rig Florida’s electoral maps for Trump. Florida’s constitution flat-out bans drawing congressional districts with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party,” a rule Florida voters themselves approved. But on Tuesday, Ron DeSantis is calling lawmakers to Tallahassee to do exactly that. His plan is a three-tiered end run: draft the maps in secret inside the governor’s office so there’s no paper trail, hide behind executive privilege when the lawsuits come, and run out the clock under the Purcell Principle, which discourages judges from fixing maps close to an election. Republicans already hold 20 of Florida’s 28 House seats even though in the last statewide election Trump got 56% of the vote, not the 71% representation Florida Republicans already have in the US House. DeSantis wants three to five more.
This is what the national redistricting war Trump launched in Texas actually looks like up close: elected officials openly admitting they can’t win a fair fight and plotting how to avoid one. Virginia Democrats just punched back with voter-approved new districts of their own, up to four more Democratic-leaning seats, because, sadly, when one side is cheating, refusing to cheat back is called “losing.”