Four days later, federal agents arrested three of those involved with the protest, including a civil rights attorney named Nekima Levy Armstrong.

That the White House celebrated Levy Armstrong’s arrest was not surprising. What mattered, however, is how the White House celebrated the development. The Associated Press reported:

On its official X page, the White House shared an image of Nekima Levy Armstrong that showed her in tears with her arms behind her back, standing in front of someone wearing a badge around their neck.

The problem? Levy Armstrong wasn’t actually crying. The image was manipulated to make the moment more dramatic than it actually was. … The original image, which shows Levy Armstrong with a neutral expression, was altered to make her appear emotional.

A related report in The New York Times noted that the newspaper ran the image through an artificial intelligence detection system that concluded the White House’s version of the photo “showed signs of manipulation.”....

The image of Levy Armstrong was qualitatively different: It was designed to mislead. Don Moynihan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, noted via Bluesky, “This is the first example I’ve seen of an American government using AI to meaningfully misrepresent actual events with the intent to deceive the public. We are at Stalinesque levels of propaganda.”....

But in 2026, the White House is no better than that annoying guy you went to high school with or that weird uncle who consumes conservative media all day. The president and his team, like your Facebook friends, have no qualms about spreading manipulated content without regard for accuracy.

The difference, of course, is that the White House knows it’s promoting deceptions, contributing to an information landscape in which Americans no longer know who or what to believe.

While many observers were repulsed by Donald Trump’s ridiculous speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president boasted after he left the podium that “we got great reviews.” He did not say from whom.

But the Republican didn’t stop there, going on to suggest that he’d somehow managed to subvert the audience’s expectations.

Trump: "Sometimes you need a dictator."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-21T18:00:16.139Z

....Up until very recently, it would’ve been considered a political story of dramatic significance for a sitting American president to say — out loud, in public, on the record — that he believes dictators are ever preferable to self-rule. But Trump’s comment went largely overlooked, in part because the rhetoric was overshadowed by other developments and in part because much of the political world is simply accustomed to the Republican’s overt hostility to democracy.

That said, I remain convinced that it’s best not to brush past these declarations too quickly. The president’s comment offered a fresh peek into a political philosophy he appears to embrace without embarrassment: By his own admission, Trump believes there are some conditions in which freedom should be discarded and replaced by something a bit more totalitarian.

This is the same Republican who has more than once talked about creating a temporary American “dictatorship” that he expects to lead. He has promoted images of himself in a crown. He has made Napoleonic declarations such as “he who saves his country violates no law.” He’s talked about “terminating” parts of the Constitution that stand in the way of his ambitions. He’s “joked” about canceling elections. He’s freely admitted that he believes (what passes for) his alleged conscience is “the only thing that can stop me.” He’s expressed admiration for foreign authoritarians — not despite their despotism, but because of their despotism.

To the extent that there was ever a serious debate about Trump’s authoritarian impulses, the president keeps offering unambiguous answers to the question.

Four years later, after winning a second term, Trump filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the Des Moines Register for publishing the results of a pre-election poll that he didn’t like. Five months after that, having returned to the White House, the president responded to a series of discouraging surveys by calling pollsters “criminals” and demanding that someone (he didn’t say who) launch an “investigation” into independent polling outlets for producing data he deemed “fake.”

As 2026 gets underway, Trump is taking further steps down the same ridiculous path. After The New York Times published the results of its latest national poll, which also showed horrible results for the White House, the president published a tirade to his social media platform:

The Times Siena Poll, which is always tremendously negative to me, especially just before the Election of 2024, where I won in a Landslide, will be added to my lawsuit against The Failing New York Times. Our lawyers have demanded that they keep all Records, and how they ‘computed’ these fake results. … They will be held fully responsible for all of their Radical Left lies and wrongdoing!

The lawsuit he referred to was filed in the fall, when Trump announced that he was seeking $15 billion from The New York Times for coverage he said damaged his reputation. (It was one of several civil suits the president has filed of late against major news organizations.).....

No one in Republican politics has ever even attempted to produce evidence of independent news organizations having secretly conspired with pollsters to generate public opinion data that hurts the president’s feelings. The very idea — even by Trump standards — is ludicrous.

In a normal and healthy political environment, American presidents struggling with sinking public support, especially in their second term, have options: They can predict a future turnaround. They can argue that they don’t consider public opinion research to be especially important, since they can’t run for a third term anyway. They might even adopt a longer view and insist that they expect history to vindicate them.

They might even consider changing course and moving away from the policies that are dragging down their popularity.

In 2026, however, Americans are not living in a normal and healthy political environment

During a harangue on border policies, the president abruptly switched direction. “It was a rigged election,” he said, referring to one of his go-to conspiracy theories. “Everybody knows that now. And by the way, numbers are coming out that show it even more plainly. We caught them. We caught them.”....

A day later, during remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump repeated the same nonsense — this time with a fresh element.

Trump: "It was a rigged election. Everyone knows that, they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It's probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election."

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-01-21T15:18:23.612Z

.....It’s tempting to wonder why the president would have direct, personal knowledge about who “will soon be prosecuted,” but there’s no point in playing dumb about the White House’s control of the Justice Department.

That said, there’s no reason to assume that Trump was telling the truth. To the contrary, there’s every reason to believe the opposite — in part because he’s the most prolific liar in American public life, and in part because there’s still no evidence that anyone committed any crime connected to the 2020 race (apart from the president and his allies).....

In October, Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who has touted election conspiracy theories, joined the administration as a special government employee with one focus: investigating the 2020 election.

With time running out in the 2024 presidential election and early voting underway across much of the country, then-Sen. JD Vance refused to answer questions about who the rightful winner of the 2020 race was. The Ohio Republican complained at the time that political journalists were “obsessed” with the election from four years earlier.

More than a year later — and roughly five years since Trump lost his re-election bid — someone is obsessed with the 2020 race, and by all appearances that fixation is intensifying.

Five months ago, the public first learned about Charles Borges, then the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, and the remarkable whistleblower complaint he filed. According to his dramatic accusations, members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operation had uploaded a copy of a highly sensitive database to a vulnerable cloud server, creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”

The New York Times reported soon after that the database in question included “individuals’ full names, addresses and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation’s most sensitive repositories of personal information.”,,,,,

In August, after Borges blew the whistle, the Trump administration said he was wrong. This week, however, the Department of Justice implicitly acknowledged in a court filing that he was right, although it did not refer to the former chief data officer by name.

So where does that leave Borges, five months later? The Washington Post highlighted a quote from his lawyer:

‘Having admitted what Mr. Borges has said all along, the Social Security Administration must take appropriate action to protect Americans’ data, and Mr. Borges must get justice for the violation of his rights,’ Borges’s attorney Debra Katz said in a statement Tuesday.

For now, it’s an open question as to what “getting justice” might entail, even as the whistleblower appears to be moving forward on a new career path: In November, Borges announced that he’d run a Democratic state Senate campaign in his home state of Maryland.

The legal team pitched a hysterical tale involving George Soros, “communist money,” the Clinton Foundation, antifa, Cuba and possibly China. Rudy Giuliani and his colleagues also pointed the finger at Venezuela and its former president, Hugo Chávez, who’d died seven years earlier.

All of this came to mind anew watching the president’s lengthy White House press conference on Tuesday, when he fielded a related question.

Q: Now that Maduro is in custody, has any more information emerged that you could share with us regarding Venezuelan election software and Venezuelan ties to tampering with the 2020 election? Would you consider speaking to him personally?

TRUMP: Yeah, they've learned some things

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-20T20:21:36.108Z

.....As my MS NOW colleague Brandy Zadrozny recently explained, one of the recurring storylines among far-right conspiracy theorists is that Venezuela somehow played a role in dictating the outcome of the U.S. election in 2020 by controlling voting machines.

It’s all nonsense, of course, but almost immediately after U.S. bombs started dropping on Venezuela and Maduro was taken into custody, conspiratorial pillow executive Mike Lindell celebrated, telling The Atlantic, “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections.”

Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn and Infowars propagandist Alex Jones have pushed similar lines. And after conservative media personality Sean Davis wrote on social media that “it’s gonna be wild when Maduro tries to plead to lesser charges by proffering evidence that the 2020 election was stolen,” Ed Martin, Trump’s “weaponization” czar at the Justice Department, responded with a tweet of his own that consisted entirely of an exclamation point.

At last count, House Republicans have filed impeachment resolutions against eight federal judges, though these radical efforts have been largely relegated to the party’s fringe. This week, that changed suddenly and unexpectedly. Politico reported:

Speaker Mike Johnson now supports the push inside his party to bring impeachment articles against judges perceived as antagonistic of President Donald Trump’s agenda — a notable shift for the Louisiana Republican who over the summer sought to squelch such effort.

‘I’m for it,’ Johnson told reporters at his weekly news conference Wednesday, responding to the question of whether he would endorse impeaching judges who have ruled against the administration.

He did not appear to be kidding.

Johnson on impeaching judges: "I'm for it"

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) 2026-01-21T16:47:03.212Z

.....A group of congressional Republicans apparently interpreted Trump’s appeal as a directive and got to work introducing impeachment resolutions against judges who ruled against the White House’s preferences.

Indeed, the list grew quickly. Over the course of a few months, GOP impeachment resolutions were filed against Boasberg, U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Boardman, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer, U.S. District Court Judge Theodore Chuang, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer and U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell Jr. (Technically, Engelmayer is facing two parallel impeachment measures.)....

The campaign, however, was largely ignored by most GOP lawmakers. Of the eight judicial impeachment resolutions introduced in 2025, most have fewer than 10 co-sponsors. There are currently 218 House Republicans, including a great many who deserve to be seen as very far to the right, and roughly 90% of them have made no effort to support or to advance these efforts......

It’s worth emphasizing that the impeachment resolutions, should GOP leaders bring them to the House floor, are likely to fall short of a majority. What’s more, even if the House were to impeach any or all of these jurists, it would take 67 votes in the Senate to remove them from the federal bench, which is effectively an impossibility.

These obvious attempts at intimidating the judiciary, in other words, almost certainly won’t work.

But for Johnson to endorse publicly such a radical effort speaks volumes about how radical his politics have become.

Last year, a Marquette University Law School poll found that 70% of Americans opposed impeaching federal judges over anti-Trump rulings. There is, however, often a big gap between what the public wants and what Republican officials decide to do. Watch this space.

But as is always the case, the details would reflect the panel’s merits. With this in mind, The Associated Press reported on the unveiling of the entity known as the Board of Peace:

President Donald Trump on Thursday inaugurated his Board of Peace to lead efforts at maintaining a ceasefire in Israel’s war with Hamas, insisting that ‘everyone wants to be a part’ of the body he said could eventually rival the United Nations — despite many U.S. allies opting not to participate.

In a speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump sought to create momentum for a project to map out a future of the war-torn Gaza Strip.

Right off the bat, the American president’s boasts about “everyone” expressing an interest in joining the board is more wishful thinking than an accurate summary of global support. Several prominent U.S. allies — including the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, France, Ukraine, Norway and Sweden — have already declined invitations to participate, at least for now.

The White House had originally said that Belgium had signed on to the board’s charter, but its deputy prime minister soon after issued a statement explaining that Belgium was not a part of the entity......

Left unsaid is who, exactly, will be responsible for administering and allocating the collected funds, though in context, it seems likely that Trump will expect to maintain control.

Trump’s Board of Peace logo is basically the UN logo, except dipped in gold and edited so the world only includes America.

— Adam Schwarz (@adamjschwarz.bsky.social) 2026-01-22T10:16:52.596Z

Finally, there’s the board’s logo, which looks similar to the United Nations’ logo, except this one emphasizes North America — and like everything else associated with the incumbent Republican president, it’s gold.