Chicken Nuggets and Librarians

May 13, 2025

The Bookshelf Coup

I often find myself having to make editorial decisions about which insane, illegal, or corrupt development to write about on any given day. Some stories get bumped to the next morning. Some vanish into the pile, quietly smothered by something more immediate. That’s just the math of limited time and space paired with infinite outrage.

The triage is brutal. I’ll sit there debating whether to cover a flagrant constitutional violation or a freshly unveiled abuse of power knowing that either one, in a sane timeline, would’ve sunk a presidency. But in this timeline, I have to rank and prioritize them. Prioritize! Sorting the structural collapse by severity. Yay, me!

That’s what happened with the Librarian of Congress story. I saw the headline about Carla Hayden being fired and thought, well that’s not good, but I didn’t dig deep. I flagged it, filed it mentally under “bad but niche,” and moved on.

Then I saw this Rolling Stone article claiming this might be part of a legislative power grab to take over Congress. That got my attention. I read the article and while it was clearly raising alarms, it didn’t quite spell out what the actual threat was. The stakes were there, but scattered. So I went back through it, looked up what the Library of Congress actually does (sadly, I wasn’t entirely sure) and tried to piece together what they were getting at. How could Trump take control of congress through the Library of Congress? It turns out it isn’t exactly like that, but also.. not that far off. I guess it depends on how you slice the tomato.

First, a familiar pattern. Sudden purge of career or expert positions and unilateral replacements by people wholly unqualified.

On May 8, Trump fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, via email. For ambiguous reasons. Two days later, he fired Shira Perlmutter, head of the U.S. Copyright Office. That second firing came right after her office released a report raising serious legal questions about how AI companies are using copyrighted material to train their models. Then, with barely a pause, Trump appointed Todd Blanche, his former defense lawyer, to run the Library. Blanche is also still serving as Deputy Attorney General at the DOJ.

That’s the first thing the article didn’t quite hit hard enough, in my opinion: this is a crossover appointment. One guy now holds a key role in the executive branch and the legislative branch. That shouldn’t happen. Those branches are supposed to be separate for a reason.

Blanche isn’t the only one pulling double duty across what are supposed to be separate branches of government. Marco Rubio is currently serving as Secretary of State, National Security Adviser, USAID Administrator, and somehow also the acting Archivist of the United States. Daniel Driscoll is both Army Secretary and acting head of the ATF, a crossover that blurs the line between military leadership and domestic law enforcement. Kash Patel briefly held both the FBI and ATF reins at the same time. This is power centralization, stacking multiple roles under a handful of loyalists, often placing executive hands directly on levers that were designed to be out of reach.

Blanche’s appointment is one that cracks the wall between branches.

All I knew previous to this about the Library of Congress is that it was like a warehouse of all the books and movies published. But it turns out that it also houses the Congressional Research Service, which is what members of Congress rely on to understand policy, legal interpretation, and the background of the laws they vote on. It’s how they stay informed. So, it stands that if you install a loyalist to control that pipeline. Someone who answers to the White House and only the White House then you could decide what Congress sees, how fast they see it, and what gets quietly buried before it reaches them.

The same goes for the Copyright Office. That’s a legislative agency that enforces intellectual property law and that includes how AI companies are allowed to operate. If you’re connected to businesses relying on mass content scraping, that office can be a major problem. So replace the leadership, slow-walk the legal challenges, and shift the interpretation of the law. Suddenly the rules bend in your direction.

The article touches on all of this, but it’s written like a warning flare with a bit too much swagger rather than a breakdown, for my tastes. What’s happening here isn’t some wild conspiracy to "take over Congress" in the theatrical sense. It's more deliberate than that. The strategy is to gut the internal systems that let Congress operate independently regarding its legal guidance, policy research and its ability to stay informed. Replacing them with a loyalist infrastructure that serves the executive first and the public, not at all.

That’s the move. It’s not a headline stunt. It’s backend sabotage.

Junk Food Diplomacy

Of all the symbols of American collapse currently parading around in plain sight, this one might be the most on-the-nose: the Saudi Royal Court rolled in a mobile McDonald’s to feed Donald Trump during his recent visit. Because they know exactly what he is and how to feed it.

This wasn’t cultural exchange. It wasn’t hospitality. It was strategic humiliation disguised as a Happy Meal. They didn’t serve fast food because they admire America’s culinary exports, they served it because they knew it would flatter the man in front of them. The same man who once explained, in public, that he trusts McDonald’s because he’s afraid of being poisoned.

And it worked. Trump is completely incapable of recognizing the insult. Because to him, it wasn’t a backhanded parody, it was a gift. A “golden tribute”. He doesn’t see the condescension. He sees branding. He sees comfort. He sees himself. This is what American diplomacy has been reduced to: disposable wrappers and cold fries used as tools of statecraft. A foreign policy built around keeping one man pacified with salt, sugar, Fish Filets.

To the rest of the world, the optics are unmistakable. Our head of state is no longer the symbol of democratic values or global leadership. He’s a parody of American overconsumption. A man so inseparable from processed meat and brand-name junk that foreign monarchies can grease the rails of international negotiations, with actual grease. This isn’t a “projection of strength.” This is what it looks like when a country exports its decadence as identity.

Imagine a respected head of state. Justin Trudeau, let’s say arriving in Tokyo and being met with a pop-up lumberjack cabin, complete with maple syrup fountains and actors in moose costumes. Or Jacinda Ardern flying into Brussels and being served a ceremonial haka by white European bureaucrats in face paint, followed by a lamb BBQ on the tarmac. It would be international scandal. It would be headline-grabbing disrespect. Because the world understands those are not just jokes, they're degrading pantomimes.

But when Trump lands in Saudi Arabia and gets a private McDonald’s truck wheeled up to the palace gates, the reaction isn’t outrage. It’s resignation. Because deep down, everyone knows it's accurate. No other world leader has ever been greeted with a parody of their country’s worst stereotype and called it diplomacy. Only America. Only Trump.

What the world sees now is that America, under Trump, is a nation whose ego is so bloated and cartoonish that its foreign policy can be steered with a combo meal. And while American families face rising food costs, supply chain instability, and deepening inequality, this man is being hand-fed nostalgia burgers by billionaires in palaces. You could not script a more efficient insult. Even Marie Antoinette’s headless corpse is appalled.

And no, the U.S. taxpayer didn’t directly pay for the McDonald’s truck. But they funded the planes. The advance teams. The security perimeter. The logistics. The image. Every inch of that circus was draped in official support. A state visit, stuffed into a greasy brown fast food sack and shoved through the drive-thru window of our empty resignation.

This wasn’t fast food. This was fast diplomacy. It told the world everything they need to know: America, once a global leader, now shows up to the negotiating table holding a milkshake. And we’re proud of it.

Final Thoughts

What can I say. In any other timeline, these two stories would be huge. Not just newsworthy but alarming. But now they’re just what’s left on the floor after triage. A couple of soft-spoken infractions for days when they’re not hanging swastikas on the White House lawn.

I almost didn’t write anything today. Didn’t feel like there was much to say. I circled back to the Library of Congress story mostly out of habit. Read it once, then again, then looked up some info and it started to settle differently.

Same with the McDonald’s thing. It felt like noise at first, something unsettling, but fundamentally unserious. But I kept coming back to it. Not because it’s funny. Because it isn’t. It’s humiliating. For all of us.

Remember, these weren’t even going to make the cut. Not because they’re unimportant, but because everything else has pushed the line so far out that they barely register.

And that’s the state we’re in. Something worth writing down happens, and you almost let it go. Not out of denial, but exhaustion.

And that’s how this keeps moving.