Blood From a Stone
Roger Stone, Trump’s half-melted gargoyle of a hatchet man, wants a U.S. Senator executed. That’s not paraphrasing. That’s exactly what he said. Out loud and on purpose. He called for Senator Mark Kelly to be “charged with treason and if convicted, executed,” supposedly in accordance with federal law. His basis? A Q level psychotic claim that Kelly is somehow financially entangled with Chinese surveillance balloon manufacturers. No actual evidence. Just another shout into the void from a man who’s been mainlining conspiracies and self-importance since Nixon’s last rotten breath.
The claim that Senator Mark Kelly has ties to a Chinese spy balloon company doesn’t hold up. Kelly co-founded an American aerospace company, World View Enterprises, which initially focused on space tourism using high-altitude balloons. It did receive early-stage investment from Tencent, a Chinese tech firm, in 2013 and 2016, but Tencent no longer has involvement, and Kelly stepped away from the company entirely in 2019, placing his financial interests in a blind trust. World View later pivoted to remote sensing and surveillance applications, but there’s no evidence of ongoing Chinese ownership or influence. Framing this as an active national security threat tied to Kelly deserving of public execution is a deliberate distortion of a now-dormant connection.
More importantly, perhaps is the trigger for Stone’s outburst. A piece of legislation Kelly co-sponsored, the End Crypto Corruption Act. It’s a bill that would bar the president, vice president, and their immediate families from launching or endorsing cryptocurrencies while in office. A reasonable measure, especially now that Trump and his allies are knee-deep in their latest grift: the $TRUMP meme coin. The coin itself is part parody, part influence machine. It rakes in trading fees, rewards top holders with VIP access to Trump himself, and operates in a legal (barely) gray zone where influence, celebrity, and money swirl together with no accountability. The coin has already funneled millions toward Trump’s ecosystem, and the legislation Kelly is backing would slam the brakes on that cash pipeline.
So Stone, loyal foot soldier that he is, went nuclear. His accusation about Kelly being in bed with Chinese balloon companies hinges on nothing. It’s a recycled smear from last year’s balloon panic, twisted into a personal attack. No source or documentation. Not even the dignity of a well-constructed lie. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of shaking a Magic 8-Ball and declaring treason based on what floats up.
Gabby Giffords, Kelly’s wife and a former congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt, called it what it is: dangerous. A sitting senator, targeted with a not so subtle fatwah by a loyalist of the man currently in charge of the most corrupt American Government in history. That used to be a national scandal. Now it barely makes a ripple. We’re watching a man call for state execution over a cryptocurrency bill, and the response from the broader political class is silence or smirking approval.
And remember, as always, this kind of thing is never just about the specific person or the specific moment. These statements test the water. They inch the line. Maybe nothing comes of this threat against Kelly, but the point isn’t whether he’s in actual danger. The point is to desensitize the public. Normalize the demand. Shift the Overton Window. Every time they float one of these trial balloons, it gets a little less shocking. A little more plausible. They will keep hurling fascist pasta at the wall. Execution fantasy linguini, loyalty pledge spaghetti, revoking citizenship shaped fettuccini shaped until something sticks. Or someone hangs. And once it does, they’ll act like it’s been there the whole time. Just part of the conversation. Just politics. Just another day.
It’s not. It never has been. Until just now.
The Quiet War on Oversight
Three new executive orders went up last week. None of them drew headlines. None of them screamed scandal or went trending on social media. Each one carries the usual bureaucratic gloss. Efficiency, fairness, domestic strength. But taken together, they sketch a pattern. Not loud or theatrical. Just steady continued pressure against the systems that exist to check power.
The first is framed as a stand for justice. It instructs federal agencies to review and limit regulations that carry criminal penalties. Particularly those that don’t require proof of intent. The stated goal is to protect people from unknowingly committing crimes. But the subtext is clear: this is about shielding those who benefit from opacity. That means entities, usually corporations or institutional players, whose operations are so sprawling, compartmentalized, or complex that they can always point to confusion or bureaucracy as a shield against liability. These are organizations that thrive in legal gray zones, where plausible deniability is built into the architecture.
The move to restrict strict liability doesn’t help the average citizen navigate a confusing form. It helps large actors claim ignorance as a defense. When the oil spills or the unsafe working conditions hit the news, suddenly it matters whether they meant to cut corners. Or more importantly whether it can be proven that they meant to cut corners. This order offers them a legal foothold they didn’t have before. And one that they will abuse and stretch to its most impossible limits.
The second calls for “efficiency” at the Office of the Federal Register. That is the agency responsible for publishing rules, notices, and the legal scaffolding of federal action. It sounds harmless. It might even be useful. But when paired with the deregulatory push, it reads differently. If you want to ram through structural change without friction, you don’t rewrite the rules. You make sure they post quickly, bypass challenge, and disappear into the noise before anyone notices. Speed becomes strategy. And the systems built for public notice and scrutiny are being quietly and swiftly repurposed as throughput machines.
The third directs agencies to ease the regulatory burden on domestic pharmaceutical manufacturers. On the surface, this is about resilience. Reducing dependence on foreign drugmakers. Boosting U.S. capacity. But it does so by relaxing safety inspections and fast-tracking approvals. Which means we’re solving one crisis by seeding another. The industry already leans hard on cost-cutting. Remove the oversight, and you’re ensuring a collapse in quality. And once that collapse is baked into federal policy, good luck extracting it.
None of these orders is scandalous on its own. They’re too clean, too measured. They’re the kind of policy that slips past the defenses of content mills and click farmers. But if you step back and look at the frame, the shape becomes more clear: reduce accountability, streamline executive control, and make sure nobody has time or tools to object. A legal toolkit for acting faster, being challenged less, and never having to prove you did anything wrong.
There’s no headline for that. No viral moment. But it reshapes the landscape just the same. Not by breaking the system overtly but by bending it until it serves a different master.
Importantly; This is all being done by executive fiat. These are not the slow-moving gears of democratic process. They are single-handed directives, chipping away at public protections without legislative consent. The unitary executive theory isn’t being debated, it’s being enacted. Just like it was sketched out in Project 2025. Just like it was fantasized by Yarvin and the rest of the neo-authoritarian hobbyists now writing real policy.
This is beyond normal. And the only reason it feels familiar is because we’re already living in a world ruled by toddler scribbles on greasy paper. There’s no chaos here, not even the illusion of it. Everything about these actions is quiet, composed, and deliberate. This isn’t bureaucratic churn. It’s streamlined authority, wrapped in the language of governance. The decisions aren’t sloppy, they’re controlled. The design isn’t hiding, it’s calmly asserting itself. This doesn’t look like dysfunction. It looks like a plan being executed with precision. These moves aren’t chaotic, they’re engineered.
They flatten resistance, suppress feedback, and smother transparency under the language of competence. The system is being retooled to answer to fewer people while doing harm to as many as possible.
A Receipt, Not a Reprieve
On May 9, 2025, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration, halting the executive’s attempt to gut large portions of the federal workforce. The order came in response to an executive action and internal memos designed to carry out rapid reductions in force across key agencies. All moves that illegally bypassed Congress entirely. Illston’s ruling was clear: the President may pursue structural change, but he must do so lawfully, and large-scale reorganization demands Congressional cooperation.
Note: This court order is not a win. it’s a receipt. It confirms what’s been evident from the beginning: this administration has been out of pocket from day one. The executive branch is acting unilaterally, issuing structural decrees that Congress was meant to weigh. And the republican controlled Congress? They’ve shrugged it off. They’ve chosen not to assert their constitutional role, not to punish overreach, not to protect their own power. If anyone should be tried for treason, perhaps it is them.
Much of the damage is already done. Agencies have already been gutted, staff terminated or reassigned, public-facing services scaled back to ghost operations. Careers ended. Projects abandoned. Regulatory systems collapsed mid-review. Even if reversed, much of it is irreversible in practice. Critical expertise has been lost, continuity broken and deterrents erased. This restraining order is a minor speed bump on a stretch of scorched earth.
This isn’t a moment for relief. It’s a case study in how the executive can outpace the law. They act faster than courts can respond and with a confidence that Congress refuses to check. Even now, the judiciary is just starting to confront what happened on day one. All while the administration is already floating the suspension of habeas corpus and rolling out far worse. The courts are lagging by months. Congress is asleep at the wheel. And the system built to prevent tyranny is moving too slow to see it and actively encouraging it’s growth.
A Flying Palace Bribe for the Toddler King
Set this next story against the backdrop of Roger Stone’s fantasy indictments. Where a long-divested stake in a balloon tourism startup is cause for execution. Now compare that to this: a sitting president about to take delivery of a flying fortress from a foreign monarchy his family does business with. If there were a meter for actual compromise, it would have already snapped off its spindle.
The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to accept a gift from the Qatari royal family: a luxury Boeing 747-8 aircraft, previously customized to the tune of $400 million and nicknamed the "Palace in the Sky." The aircraft, originally intended for use by Qatar's emir, is now slated to become the next Air Force One during Trump's second term, and eventually transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation by 2029.
On paper, as explained by the leader of Trump’s personal goon squad, Pam Bondi, the plane is being accepted by the U.S. government. But the entire arrangement reeks of personal indulgence dressed up in state protocol. The administration’s argument is that this will save money. Because apparently receiving a literal flying palace from a Gulf monarchy is a frugal, patriotic act. Budget hawks, avert your eyes.
What this actually is, however, is a winged monument to ego, foreign entanglement, and unaccountable power. And it’s not without precedent. Jared Kushner secured a bailout from a Qatari-linked fund for the family’s drowning Fifth Avenue property. The Trump Organization inked a multi-billion dollar golf course deal with Qatari interests. And Trump’s entire foreign policy track record reads like a customer loyalty punch card from the Gulf monarchies. So when a $400 million luxury aircraft appears, it's not a diplomatic courtesy, it’s a loyalty dividend.
And somehow, that isn’t enough to stop it. Legal counsel insists this is a gift to the country, not the man. But the country won’t be flying in it. Trump will. And to make matters worse, the aircraft is scheduled to be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation. A barely-sketched nonprofit with murky financials and no fixed location. It exists more as a placeholder for personal branding than a legitimate archival institution. What we're watching isn’t only a breach of ethics, it’s also bribery of foreign luxury into private infrastructure under the cover of legacy-building. And if history is any guide, it’ll be parked next to a golf course by next spring.
This is monarchy in beta testing. It’s hereditary indulgence disguised as national interest. The jet might as well come embossed with a family crest and a throne. Although it should be noted that this has not been entirely ruled out yet. It is rule by velvet rope, enforced by a legal team too slippery to pin down and too shameless to blush. And no matter how many coats of legal shellac Pam Bondi tries to paint over it, this is a textbook violation of the Emoluments Clause. The Constitution doesn’t stutter: no gifts, titles, or benefits from foreign states, period unless Congress gives explicit consent. Which it hasn’t. And won’t. Because the same people tasked with upholding the law are too busy hiding from it behind press briefings and polite shrugs.
And Congress? They are mumbling something about paperwork while the toddler king loads his duffel bags and golf clubs into a private 747 gifted by petro-royalty. Because when the grift reaches cruising altitude, all anyone seems to do is order another drink and look out the window.
Meanwhile, every red flag in the national security sector is waving like it’s Mardi Gras. A foreign government just handed the president a piece of hardware large enough to host a summit and complex enough to conceal a buffet of listening devices. Passive signals collection, embedded long-term surveillance architecture, firmware-level tracking, sabotage-ready systems; Take your pick. If you were to build a honeypot for state secrets with unlimited budget and zero oversight, this is what it would look like. And yet the response from our institutions is less ‘secure the perimeter’ and more ‘let’s see what the upholstery looks like.’
We are being ruled by a toddler king. And now he has his wings. And a minibar. And diplomatic immunity in the sky.
Final Thoughts
All of this is happening so plainly. So easily. No pretense, no subterfuge. Just open threats, open grift, and open dismantling. All streamed live and wrapped in legalese. We are not watching the collapse of democracy. We are watching the construction of something else. Something narrower, darker, meaner. Permanent.
The machinery of government is being converted, piece by piece, into a vehicle for personal power. Justice is now a slogan. Oversight is now a delay tactic. And the Constitution is whatever someone like Pam Bondi says it is, until the courts are too slow or too captured to disagree.
They are not accelerating. We are decelerating. And that gap between action and accountability is where this entire regime lives. It is the gap that allows execution threats to pass as commentary. That turns executive overreach into administrative reform. That transforms a $400 million foreign bribe into a patriotic asset.
This is not about incompetence. It’s about confidence. Confidence that nobody will stop them. That the courts will take too long. That Congress will do nothing. That the press will call it theater. And that the people, scared, tired, distracted, will eventually get used to it.
But we shouldn’t. Not now. Not ever.